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Alone: the Skills Challenge ★★★½
SBS Viceland, Tuesday, 9.25pm
The Alone franchise has conquered the world, spreading from America to Scandinavia to Australia to the UK and doubtless more to come. Its popularity would appear to be a result of a public thirst for authenticity: where reality franchises based on people being thrust into the wilderness in various competitive contexts have been successful – and we all know the one show that looms largest over the genre – the appeal of Alone is that the concept is stripped back to its absolute basics. Here, there are no games, no reward challenges, no tribal councils and not even a film crew: the contestants are on their own, filming themselves, with only one objective: stay in the wild for as long as they can bear it. Whoever can hack it the longest wins. Simple.
Alone: The Skills Challenge remains committed to the core values of Alone.Credit: SBS
Unsurprisingly, a successful franchise will spawn spin-offs, and Alone: The Skills Challenge is one of them. But while it complicates the format a little, thankfully it maintains a commitment to the core values of the show. In particular, the title: the contests on this challenge may have a more directed task to perform, but they are still very much alone, and the appeal of watching someone try to beat the odds with no assistance remains the compelling point.
So, to the set-up. Three hardy adventurers, previous Alone competitors who wish to prove themselves gluttons for punishment, have been enticed back into the wilderness. Each episode features a new trio taking on a new task. The first episode stars Amos, a rugged survivalist who learned his skills in Central America but plies them in Indiana, who survived 58 days on his series of Alone; Lucas, a Montana wild man who lasted 39 days; and Jordan, a fairly chill dude who won his series with a whopping 77-day stay. Their challenge has been set by a fellow ex-contestant, Callie, who demands that the three men please her by making an “earth shelter”. Using a little box of basic tools, they must somehow dig out and build a shelter that fits one person inside, has a working fireplace (!) and is 10 degrees warmer inside than out. They have three days to finish. While each man is given the same challenge, the difficulties involved vary: the rocky terrain of the Montana mountains makes digging a major hassle for Lucas, for example, while the Arizona desert provides fewer trees for timber than would be ideal for Jordan.
The challenges vary as the contestants rotate – in episode two Amos gives three of his fellow Alone-ers the job of building a bridge – but the core remains the same: testing humans’ ability to adapt to nature by using what they find in their environment to create what they need. The different ways in which different people meet the challenge, overcoming the obstacles of their particular surrounds through ingenuity and unflagging determination, can be fascinating and not a little exhausting.
It is, of course, a very different proposition to the original Alone. If it’s more complex practically speaking, it’s simpler psychologically: if you do the job the best, you win; if you don’t, you don’t. This is in sharp contrast to the original, which asks: How much can you stand before you admit defeat? The skills challenge does not require participants to look deeply inside themselves so much, and in that way is a more fun experience: it’s easy to enjoy the fun of the build – setbacks and disappointments included – when you don’t feel the people you’re watching are going through hell.
But in an interesting way, Alone: The Skills Challenge is very similar not only to its parent program but also to many other reality shows, in that at its most fundamental it brings us people doing things that most of us would not have the slightest idea how to do. To build a shelter or a bridge is, to this writer at least, as impossible as surviving two months alone in a forest – or, for that matter, making a restaurant-quality dessert or building a theme park out of Lego. In all these cases, I would not even know where to begin, and that’s the beauty of The Skills Challenge and its spiritual siblings: there is something beautiful about seeing someone do something extraordinary. It demonstrates just how marvellously vast is the potential of we humble humans.
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