Hacking the Wild

The idea of someone using common electronics, like a laptop, phone and even an electronics kit to complement their survival skills, sounded like an interesting idea, especially for kids to educate them about science in a fun and exciting manner.

Unfortunately this show doesn't really achieve that goal. The usefulness of the gadgets he makes are debatable, many are completely useless or at least inferior to a low-tech solution.

If you are looking for a show to illustrate basic science principles to kids in an entertaining manner, I'd look elsewhere, many people on YouTube do a far better job of that.

If you are looking for a new survival show, unless you want to watch someone who appears mostly incompetent at survival, negotiate highly staged obstacles, I'd give this a miss.

In saying that, I found that I had a good laugh, mostly at his ineptitude and the sarcastic remarks made by the real survival experts, who provide him with a little advice at the beginning.

The production values are on par with other survival shows like Dual Survival and Bear Grylls, so for that I give it 3 stars.

I really _want_ to like this show.

That was true before I started watching it, and it's true now that I've seen the first five episodes.

It's not that I've seen a ton of survival shows--I haven't seen anything that Bear Grylls has done yet, for example. But I did love Les Stroud's Survivorman. And in general, I really like documentaries done in an infotainment style. I love travel and adventure shows. I'm a huge fan of Expedition Unknown. I'm a huge fan of River Monsters. I'm also a big fan of a bunch of science-oriented infotainment documentary shows. I love Mythbusters. I love Outrageous Acts of Science.

So when I saw advertisements for this show, it seemed right up my alley.

Unfortunately, after five shows, I'm not at all convinced that it wasn't intended as a mockumentary. It's a bit more enjoyable when you think it might be a put-on with comedic intent.

Hacking the Wild is quite formulaic. We begin with host Andy Quitmeyer traveling to some exotic locale with a tale of people "recently" being stranded there. In every show but one so far, supposedly they managed to survive for four days prior to rescue. Why does Hacking the Wild claim they stranded for four days? Because that's how long Quitmeyer will be stranded. It's the formula of the show.

The raison d'etre is that Quitmeyer is going into the wilderness armed with some technological gadgets and absent some of the normal gear one would have. He's going to adapt the technological resources to aid his survival.

Upon arrival, Quitmeyer first meets with a "survival expert" (they all come across like rather amateur actors instead, but maybe they are who the show says they are). The same thing always happens in these scenes. The survival expert says that Quitmeyer is crazy to head into the wilderness with what he has in his pack. Quitmeyer meanwhile gives them a gadget for monitoring his progress.

The items that Quitmeyer does and doesn't bring with him are fairly ridiculous. No one is going to head deep into the Alaskan wilderness without a compass. And no one is going to into these locations loaded with lasers, servos, chemistry kits, a big array of gator clip leads, etc. On top of that, he never seems to have any power problems, even after three days in harsh weather. So that part doesn't seem very realistic or very useful if the show has instructional intent.

On top of that, the things that Quitmeyer builds with his tech often seem both ridiculous and woefully under-explained. He frequently builds some crazy Rube Goldberg-like contraption without showing very well just how he's building it or just how it works. At least he doesn't do this in a manner where anyone watching could be expected to build this sort of stuff themselves, unless they could do so without needing to watch Quitmeyer in the first place.

But there are bigger problems than this. For one, Quitmeyer comes across as if he has zero practical, common-sense survival skills. I don't know if that's an act for the show, but there's no way that someone would go into the wilderness while making the decisions that he routinely makes and not wind up severely injured and/or severely ill followed by severely dead. It often seems more like you're watching an old Jerry Lewis film--"Jerome in the Jungle" perhaps, as Quitmeyer bumbles his way through the dumbest decisions ever regarding how and where to travel and what risks to take.

It doesn't help that Quitmeyer does not come across as very likable. He seems rather weaselly and nerdy. "Nerdy" can be endearing, of course, especially to other nerds, but Quitmeyer seems rather like the kind of nerd who always wants to hang out with you even though you keep avoiding him.

Another problem is that you often do not get much of a sense of Quitmeyer making progress. Days will go by where he apparently doesn't travel at all, for example, even though the overall plan is to travel to a specific location. This just leads to the sense of the show being staged, not really the scenario that it's claiming to be. It's simply as an excuse to build those Rube Goldberg contraptions as an idiot savant.

Another huge problem is that Quitmeyer is clearly not stranded in the wilderness alone. He has at least one camera/sound-man with him. This is unlike Survivorman, say, where Les Stroud demonstrated at least once just how he filmed the show. Here, occasionally they try to give the impression of Quitmeyer filming everything himself, but the show is loaded with obvious shots from a separate cameraman, as they pan the camera, zoom in and out etc. from a distance. Some shots are also obviously drone shots, but Quitmeyer is never shown operating the drone. He'd have to be operating it to get the shots they're getting.

So it's never really believable that Quitmeyer is stranded at all, or that he only has the resources that he's showing on camera when it comes to food and water for example. Of course, some of the scenarios he's placed himself in so far would have been far easier to get out of anyway, merely by sensibly hiking in a known direction. Quitmeyer's stupid on-camera decisions often seem designed to make his situation worse and enable more gadgetry.

It doesn't take much to start laughing at Quitmeyer and the show instead, much like you'd laugh at "Jerome in the Jungle". There's also a bit of Gilligan's Island to it--Quitmeyer is both Gilligan and the Professor rolled into one. Seen as a fairly subtle mockumentary, there is more value in Hacking the Wild, but it's still not a great show. I'll be surprised if it lasts very long.

No one would get in such situations with all this equipment this guy carries in his backpack with his "everyday electronics". Which seems to always have some hard to explain extras to suit the shows situation. Most would not even have a backpack or items would get lost in most worst cases. I love survival shows but this one is for dreamers not reality and I always end up yelling at the TV about how staged this or that is. There are some good hacks but you will most likely use them in the comfort of your backyard.

The show has some interesting ideas, and for the most part employs actual science. However the practicality of a number of the things demonstrated is very low, if not totally pointless.

Additionally, Andy, the survivor / hacker, is a vegetarian. The ability for humans to totally avoid meat is a luxury excess of our modern society - a vast array of fruits and vegetables are available year round even in temperate regions. In many of the areas he visits, the only type of food available for harvest is animal. It's hard to take a _survival_ show seriously when a person would die from not consuming the available food.

A better format for this show would have been some kind of survival tribe type setting, where Andy was with other people that were more of the true survivalists. They would have a village type habitat He could then provide them with tech to make their tasks and lifestyle easier / better / more pleasant. However a problem with this (as illustrated in the few interactions he had with other people on the show) is that there would be a lot of pushback about the ideas simply not being practical or effective enough to bother with in the first place.

Ultimately, the settings are too contrived (he just happened to have peltier devices with him one time...), and the host is too naive and inexperienced in deadly survival settings for us to feel like we should be learning how to survive from him. That's why I feel a different format for the show would be better received.

The premise is a guy with limited - as it turns out extremely limited - outdoor experience trying to survive for four days in the wilderness. He can bring along a backpack full of whatever he wants as long as it is something no sane person would bring with them on a hike.

If anyone actually wandered off into the wilds with the stuff this guy hauls around in his backpack they would need Search and Rescue before the weekend was out. He carries no useful items. Instead, he tries to Rube Goldberg complicated, prone to failure, and largely ineffectual solutions to basic problems with pre-established simple solutions.

Example. He wants fresh water. Does he bring purification tablets? No. Apparently there was no room left in his backpack after packing much more important outdoor items like an electric drill and a laptop. Does he boil the water? In one episode he boils a tiny amount of water in snail shells. A moment later he crafts an antenna out of aluminum foil making you wonder why he didn't make a bowl out of the foil and boil water in it. Never mind.

The next time he needs fresh water he makes a UV light wand from a pair of LEDs, one at the top, one at the bottom of a stirring stick. He then gently stirs a cup of water for a few moments and drinks it. This is a seriously stupid and dangerous alternative to boiling. UV light can disinfect, if it is of the right wavelength and has sufficient exposure, strength, and duration. This hack didn't meet the exposure criteria, at a minimum, as the water in the center of the glass was never exposed. Not to mention he placed the UV emitters in a glass test tube, blocking UVB. I just hope for his sake the water he drank came from a bottle of Perrier offscreen.

The point is his "hacks" are largely theoretical and not practical in the slightest. Compounding the problems are the obvious presence of a camera man, staged meetups at the conclusion of his hikes, laughable decision making, visible "cheater" devices to make his hacks work, and a generally unlikeable main character.

Between the technical problems and an actor who apparently has never been outside before this is poor viewing. Four stars for a decent idea of a show. No stars for the poor execution. Four stars.