After being put through the test of time with other survival shows making it on to the scene, Les Stroud's Survivorman still reigns supreme. Unlike the rest, Survivorman is the only one where the host is completely alone throughout the filming of every episode. And each one is done for seven days, as opposed to some usually unknown (and probably shorter) length of time, as in the case of Man versus Wild, Dual Survival, etc.
Although it is not as exciting as some of the competition, using what you learn from Les will not get you killed. There is no climbing into bottomless crevasses of glaciers or doing butt slaloms down scree slopes, but rather just straight forward survival techniques displayed in easy to understand presentations.
And perhaps most important aspect of the show is the amount of failures that Les encounters. Even with the years of experience that he has accumulated, many of his attempts fall flat simply due to the actual difficulty of what he is trying to do. This not only presents a realistic image of how hard true survival is, but it also shows that in a survival situation, you can fail many times and still survive.
