Alone: The Beast

Alone is one of my favourite TV shows but this is just a quick cash in on it.

It's still enjoyable but I noticed a few things in episode 3 that makes me thing this is fake. First they were filming at night trying to start a fire but you can see smoke coming into camera shot, next they have the ox horn with a clean cut and lastly they were trying to build fish traps and all the branches had clean cuts???

Keep it real and use the original format.

They've dropped the ball really badly. This is right on par with Naked and Afraid with showing the same footage over and over again. Add some facts about dangers the competitors will never come close to and there you have it. They're given more than enough food just to hunker down and lose weight for the period.

Everything that was great about Alone has been lost.

Excellent, extremely challenging. Highlights the most crucial basic survival skills.

OMG, how about using your shoelace to make a firebow, and who cut the musk ox horn off with a saw in episode 3. Appears staged to me. Great entertainment for someone from New York City.

Alone: The Beast is a pretty run of the mill survival show, comparable to other 60-minute format shows out there. Part of the show is self filmed and much of the daytime episodes include a camera crew for some shots. Because the contestants are given no equipment and are granted an initial substantial source of food they spend most of their time conserving energy and avoiding any activities of real entertainment value. Also, because it's a fixed term (30 day) survival situation the contestants aren't incentivized to dig in and develop meaningful long-term survival tactics.

This show lacks most of the magic of the original series where you seem to develop a personal relationship with the contestants and learn about who they are and why they're there. If you cut away the life changing money, the competition against other people, the highs and the lows of lone survival, and the season-long wait to see who triumphs, you get this series. I understand the need to refresh the brand and the format but this is just a unmemorable exercise in primitive survivial.