There’s something about Sundays that seems perfectly suited for survival-based reality shows, and here’s a rundown of some of the night’s highlights:
Running Wild with Bear Grylls: The Challenge
Daveed Diggs, rapper and star of Hamilton and Blindspotting to name just a few, is the first to admit he has “zero” experience as a survivalist, with the possible exception of his upbringing in Oakland, CA. And while we wouldn’t question that particular bona fides, we get his point: Surviving the mean streets of urban America calls for different skills than does spending two days in the wilds of Nevada without food or shelter.
Enter Running Wild With Bear Grylls: The Challenge. On Sunday’s episode of the show in which Grylls escorts a celebrity into rugged and oft-uncharted territories, he choppered Diggs into the Great Basin Desert and proceeded to instruct the actor how to rappel 250 feet down a 150-million-year old petrified sand dune, spark up a fire from found materials and track a horseback-riding ranger. (Pro-tip: the ability to sniff out fresh, wet horseshit from the old, stale stuff is a mad skill to have when your life is on the line.)
But it was the eating of char-broiled tarantulas for dinner that proved to be the episode’s gag-inducing highpoint. (You may recall last week’s show in which Grylls goes adventuring with Rita Ora and serves foraged dead pigeon to the hungry pop star.) Note to aspiring producers: Someone should make a competitive cooking show starring Grylls and Andrew “I’ll eat anything. No, seriously, anything” Zimmern.
On day two — the solo part of the challenge — Diggs tracks on his own, navigates an abandoned mine shaft and reaches his rendezvous point in the nick of time for a helicopter extraction that gets him home alive. Not so for that fire-roasted arachnid.
Naked and Afraid: Castaways
What took down a contestant on tonight’s installment of Naked and Afraid: Castaways? It wasn’t the snails boiled in an old bed pan for dinner. It wasn’t the crocodile lurking between a dehydrated trio in their birthday suits and a coveted freshwater spring. It wasn’t even the maddeningly obnoxious know-it-all arrogance of Bulent toward his own teammates. No, it was an invisible, microscopic bacterial infection of undiagnosable origin — couldn’t it at least have been a gnarly insect bite or a gangrenous flesh wound? — festering behind poor Candice’s ear that unfortunately earned her a forced medical evacuation from the island … and the game. Cue the sad trombone music.
Survive the Raft
Finally, Survive the Raft started out with a fun, action-packed challenge involving frantic fruit-gathering from a Garden of Eden-style setting by five naked players (always good for ratings and embarrassing rope burns) who then had to zip-line down to a lagoon to drop their harvests to awaiting rafters, all with big bounty money at stake. However, the fun and games took a dark and uncomfortable turn toward racial discord when it came time to vote a player off the raft. Merissa’s lingering distrust of Lashanna, the sole African American rafter who had gotten into a row with another player two episodes earlier, came to a head. Merissa said the raised-voice argument had left her feeling “fearful for my physical safety.” Enough other voters fell into line, and suddenly Lashanna was out, though other players, including CJ, expressed unhappiness with the turn of events. “It makes me feel frustrated,” he said. “When one person has a problem, the rest of the group jumps behind that one person. That’s group think, and group think is extremely dangerous.”
Running Wild With Bear Grylls airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on National Geographic.
Naked and Afraid: Castaways airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ion Discovery
Survive the Raft airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Discovery.
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