Shipwrecked – The BBC’s Answer to Survivor

December 15, 2012

If you get BBC America through http://www.directspecialtv.com, then you might have noticed that the British love their reality TV. While you mostly get a lot of Gordon Ramsey screaming at people in their own restaurants and health freaks telling people how to eat right, that’s not all the UK has with regards to reality TV.

They also have Shipwrecked.

Much like the American smash hit Survivor, Shipwrecked takes a bunch of strangers and strands them on an island where they must fend for themselves in order to survive. However, unlike Survivor, the early seasons of the show had a very raw format.

Instead of their being elimination rounds and tournaments, it was really about how much you could endure. Could you learn to fish? Or would you opt-out and receive transportation to the mainland. It was more about resisting the temptation to fail and return to civilization than be outright eliminated.

While the showrunners would never let someone die on the show, the stakes were much higher and if you didn’t learn how to hunt and develop a system, you might find yourself going hungry for a day or two.

In many ways, Shipwrecked was similar to Survivor, but could not at all be considered the same.

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