Discovery Channel has almost gone full butthole on its competitors in the survival TV business. Its new show, Naked and Afraid, takes the survival game to new heights. Each week, two strangers, one man and one woman, are left to survive in some remote location for 21 days. Did I mention the participants are butt-ass naked? That’s right, these Adams and Eves of reality TV are left with a couple of video cameras, a cartoonish treasure map and literally the skin on their backs. To help them on their quest (and possibly pander to hippies), each is also given a hemp bag to carry one other item of their choosing.
It must be difficult to decide what you want to bring on your super-fun, three-week, naked vacation. Is it gonna be your cell phone or a hatchet? I’ve seen three episodes so far and two couples took the smart route and brought a flint and some sort of cutting tool. For the third couple, the woman brought a machete, but the dude brought swim goggles. Swim goggles to help him survive naked in Panama for three weeks. Swim goggles. If I were his partner, I would have taken that machete and killed this man for food as soon as he pulled out those damn goggles. These people couldn’t get a fire started for like a week and to top it all off, this idiot turned out to be afraid of hunting in the ocean, so the goggles were worthless.
Swim Goggles and his girl found out the hard way that extreme environments and nudity are not always a good pair when they were nearly eaten alive by sand flies during their week without fire. An extremely white ex-marine on the first episode sunburned his junk while he was swimming to shore for the start of the show and spent the next five days laying in the makeshift shelter, just airing out his nuts, while homegirl shimmied up coconut trees naked to keep them alive.
Nature is really against you when you’re naked. In these extreme environments you are already dealing with rain, heat, potential snake/bug/monkey/alligator bites, poisonous plants, coral, rocks and trees. Throw in nudity and now you’ve increased the potential for mud butt in all its iterations, and that doesn’t help anybody. This could be the reason that the lack of clothing doesn’t seem to last too long on the show. It turns out you can do a lot of creative things with leaves.
If these naked jaybirds aren’t covering up for protection, then perhaps it’s modesty or discomfort toward their fellow companion on the trip. Remember, these people meet each other for the first time in their birthday suits in the middle of the jungle without the aid of alcohol or drugs. That’s got to make for an odd relationship. The nudity alone would make things weird, but besides being just naked, the participants on the show are also abnormal.
Normal people do not decide to abandon their clothing and stay on a deserted island for three weeks without supplies. Normal people do not include “loner” as a character trait, as one participant did on his bio. While rebuilding a shelter that had nearly burned down around him the night before, the loner said to his partner, “These are the days I’m glad I have no parents, no wife and no kids, because if I die, no one gives a shit about me.” Comforting words when your survival may very well depend on that very person.
The Discovery Channel claims to assess each contestant beforehand and only chooses “experienced survivalists.” Discovery’s definition of “experienced” seems to be pretty loose, as some participants regularly practice their survival skills, while others just seem to like camping. Goggles was afraid of pretty much every animal he encountered and refused to eat “gross things” like sea urchins to survive. He eventually confessed to his partner that he had done a lot of fancy book learning, but hadn’t had many opportunities to put his knowledge to work before then.
While on the show, one woman had such awful period cramps that she laid huddled on the beach for two days. During the ordeal, she mentioned that the month before, her cramps were so bad that she passed out. Why have the very white marine swim up to the beach without sunscreen for his balls? You would think Discovery would be screening for shit like that, but I guess they got more important things going on, like a Backyard Oil marathon.
I think that’s what makes Naked and Afraid so great. No one involved in the making of the show, from the producers to the naked participants, seems to realize what a bad idea this is even after they are ass-deep in fire ants. For example, a producer for the show nearly lost his foot to a snake bite while scouting for a location in Costa Rica just weeks before filming. The contestants for that week’s show were given the option of backing out, but instead chose to go to the very spot where the producer was bit. It’s television with reckless abandon and I just can’t look away.
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