If you haven’t seen the Discovery reality show called The Colony, it’s currently on Netflix Watch Instantly. The set-up is a group of folks going through a post apocalypse simulation for 10 weeks.
Lots of interesting science and social drama, well worth watching to get ideas.
I couldn’t make it through 2 episodes. 🙁
The contractor (Mike) is rude. But I find it interesting how the team learned to work with and sometimes around him. Right now I’m on S1 episode 4, there are traders (with a frickin 50 cal) and who do they pick to go out and negotiate? Mike the rude contractor.
I don’t like his attitude, but he’s interesting.
For the record, I like the premise but the reality TV format is really hard for me to consume. I can’t get past how artificial it is. I think I would love it if it were shot/edited differently, perhaps as a mix of characters with camcorders shooting each other and mounted surveillance cameras.
I don’t like reality TV, but I took it as “re-enactment” and slogged through so far. The participants seem to be ignoring the cameras for the most part now, 17 days in.
I’ll take Survivor Man with Les Straud instead. One thing we’ve learned from things like hurricanes and tornadoes and so on is that in a real apocalypse, even if its “just” a localized one, people mostly try to pull together. Not to say there aren’t rude jerks, or that longer term situations breed different social structures, but it kinda sounds like this is just the current take on Survivor or Temptation Island or whatever. Also, we know that “reality” TV is heavily edited to tell a
goodentertaining story, and people getting along and figuring things out makes for dull television by many counts.I’ll check out SurvivorMan, Meguey Baker
The thing is, Mike the handiman is rude, but there’s also an engineer who is trying desperately to make non-lethal methods to protect the colony, and a female self-defense instructor who very sternly takes him (Mike the rude contractor) to task several times.
It sounds like a typical reality show when you only talk about the rude guy, but the way they deal with things as a group is fascinating to me. I don’t think I’d get that from SurvivorMan, right? It’s just one guy? Or am I wrong?
Survivor Man is just one guy, yeah. He’s also the film crew and everything else. It’s just him and some cameras, trying to survive for a week.
I loved both seasons of The Colony.