Gen Zers are the laziest, most entitled generation of all time. Aside from millennials, who’d all have houses by now had they not spent their 20s scoffing avocado toast. And what about Gen Xers, the original slackers, who are seeing out their middle years listening to old Pavement vinyl while embarrassing their teenage offspring in public?
This brings us to one of the issues (there are a few) with Snowflake Mountain, Netflix’s new reality show: its assumption that young people are uniformly useless and just one underperforming TikTok video away from a nervous breakdown. Other problems include its flabby reality format, which makes it feel like Bear Grylls by way of Love Island: the participants are all air-headed and seem to speak their own made-up yoof lingo.
It’s also quite dull, everything playing out exactly as you’d expect. We are introduced to 10 young adults who have signed up under the impression that they’re headed for a jolly in a luxury villa. Actually, they’re off for a stint in the wilderness – where they will be mentored/shouted at by two American former special-forces tough guys, Matt Tate and Joel Graves.
The alleged fun flows from watching these overgrown toddlers lose the plot as they come to terms with the fact that on Netflix nobody can hear you scream. And they do scream a lot – along with whingeing, stamping their feet and complaining about the thoroughly un-Instagrammable hiking boots they’re forced to wear.
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The volunteers – perhaps “captives” is more appropriate – have clearly been cast for their annoyance factor. They include Deandra, who boasts of having been fired from three jobs, Devon, who “parties 24/7”, and Liam, an English contestant who describes himself as a diva.
Netflix has seen subscribers cancelling recently. The fear is that, in a postpandemic spiral, it will continue to commission cheap nonsense such as this rather than expensive blockbusters in the vein of Stranger Things.
But Snowflake Mountain is so sneery and jeery it’s hard to know who it’s aimed at. Gen Zers will presumably object to being stereotyped as useless and entitled. Their parents may feel likewise about their offspring. Does anyone in between even care?
And the hard-taskmaster-versus-feckless-youth formula has been carried off so much more impressively elsewhere. So while Tate and Graves try to project sleeves-up authority, they fall a long way short of Davy Fitzgerald on Davy’s Toughest Team. And that’s what Snowflake Mountain really needs: a man banging a camán on the table, telling his charges to give their everything for the jersey and the parish. This is just junior hurling in comparison.
