Outlast (Netflix) is a survival show with a terrible name in which 16 people are left to survive in an Alaskan wilderness that is apparently swarming with wolves. Those who survive there long enough will win $1 million to share.
That still sounds like a good deal of money to people of my generation, so I can see why they’ve been lured into it. “Oh, the things I could do with a share of $1 million!” I say. “I could pay tax on it! I could buy a small bedsit in Ranelagh! And if I was American I could just about pay my medical bills after starving in the wilderness!”
In voiceover the competitors say things such as, “I’m here to win,” and “I might be losing fingers, but the last thing I’m going to do is give up,” and, “I’ll die out here, starving to death if I have to”, which makes me think that when they’re recovering in their hospital beds they may end up saying, “Wait, that was an M, not a B? A million dollars?”
A gravelly voiced commentator explains the rules: “The team that prevails will have to outhunt, outsmart and outstrategise, but above all else they’ll have to outlast!”
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He is, I am pretty sure, a wolf. The production team are definitely wolves. They arrange to have the shivering humans deposited on the shores of a lake by boat, much like a Friday-night takeaway. Thinking like a wolf for a minute, they look delicious. “Hey, who ordered the 16 shivering humans?” I imagine a wolf saying to his flatmates.
We don’t hear much from the wolves, really – we see a few shots of their snarling faces – but they really should have interviewed them too. I find myself wanting to hear the wolves’ postproduction smack talk. “I am quite literally a lone wolf and I wish to eat some humans,” for example, or, “I’m a team player and I want to eat some humans,” and maybe, “The things I could do with $1 million! I would roll in it. And I would eat it, followed by some humans.”
The humans are quickly introduced to an arbitrary system of government in which four of them are declared to be leaders based on being the first to grab an axe from a box. This will seem barbarous to Irish people, who have a single-transferrable-vote proportional-representation system that we feel very smug about. I have the same urge to pontificate about our system as I do when watching UK or American elections. In fairness, if the islanders had the PR-STV system they’d definitely be eaten by wolves before the first count was even complete.
The successful leaders must then pick teams, based on the skill sets of each islander. Some are bushcraft specialists, animal trappers, hunters and soldiers. Boring! Those people are always survivalling. But there’s also, thankfully, a data analyst and a defence attorney and a “party-boat owner”, so there’s at least a chance that someone will scream, “I have analysed the data and conclude that I am being eaten by a wolf,” or, “I object! I object!”
Each competitor has that flare gun. Every Irish person is also issued with one of these. (I fired mine when I couldn’t connect my laptop to the printer)
Luckily for the “party-boat organiser”, he was one of the four who grabbed an axe, so he doesn’t have to explain his benefit to the team. (“Well, the first thing I would do on seeing a bear approach the camp would be to organise a little shindig on a raft.”)
Part of the joy of watching shows like this is being warm and eating a sandwich while watching shivering wet people eat a flattened mouse. Another part of the joy is imagining how good you would be in the wilderness yourself. I would, for example, immediately ride into the camp on the deer we would be having for dinner, having lured it to me with my gentle song. But none of them thinks of doing that.
The reality for these lesser survivalists is a bit more mundane and not even particularly wolf filled. (The main antagonists are really our ancient enemies “rain” and “cold”.) It’s about building fires and shelters that don’t leak, and collecting mushrooms and shellfish and occasionally skewering a squirrel and often talking to the camera (the most important survival skill of all). And it’s also about interpersonal dynamics and teamwork, with some devil-may-care mavericks who play by their own rules soon finding themselves teamless and firing the flare gun with which they can signal, at any time, that they wish to be extracted from the island.
It’s hard not to watch these shows and think of them as a trial run for civilisational collapse. For now, however, the sense of danger is alleviated somewhat by the knowledge that, unlike when ancient humans roamed these forests with their primitive camera crews, a return to safety is always on hand for these modern-day survivalists.
Each competitor has that flare gun. Every Irish person is also issued with one of these. (I fired mine when I couldn’t connect my laptop to the printer.) The flare gun is fired by the end of the first episode. There are twists and turns to come: injury, betrayal, power struggles, intestinal parasites, party rafts, hunger, two wolves in a long coat infiltrating the camp, trench foot. I watch knowing all the time what I would have done better.
In many ways Emily in Paris (the second part of season four debuted on Netflix this week) reminds me of the children’s classic Mr Benn. Much like Mr Benn, Emily visits a two-dimensional fantasy world (France) from the real world (the United States) while engaging in a series of outre costume changes.
In the new Christmas episode (Christmas is whenever Netflix says it is) she wears what looks like fisherman’s waders, the torso of a yeti and the hat of a bus conductor. Later she appears swathed in a vibrantly coloured Muppet pelt (even though Muppet trapping is banned) and later still in a black-velvet skiing suit that makes her look like a maverick chess piece. In the next episode she dons a giant Sherlock Holmes coat with a tartan beret (a beret so tight she cannot learn French).
While all the characters around her wear normal-people clothes, her wardrobe has been designed by a confident eight-year-old in conjunction with an ocular migraine, Richard Scarry and psilocybin.
There is still no jeopardy in Emily in Paris. It is still a comforting picture of unassailable American innocence abroad. Emily wanders Paris speaking English loudly and causing romantic chaos while inexplicably succeeding in her job marketing luxury tat. (We worked out all our psychosocial issues with advertising while watching Mad Men, apparently.) Nothing bothers her. Even when, at the end of the first new episode, Emily is moved to tears by her chaotic love life, she is immediately delighted by a fresh fall of snow. She has the object permanence of a baby or, indeed, American foreign policy.
The show will ultimately end with a huge explosion caused by Emily misunderstanding a warning sign in French. She will then emerge smiling from the wreckage while dressed as a vaudeville sailor or a sexy duck or a deconstructed mime or something. She, more than anyone else, has what it takes to survive: an American passport.
