No Rules Survival Game Show Contestants Consent To Being Killed

[MI2AZ]

Think of it as Survivor gone very wrong, or at least with the potential to go very wrong. Game2: Winter, a soon-to-be-filmed Russian reality-TV show, will drop 30 contestants into the wilds of Siberia for nine months, at the end of which one of them will nab a $1.6 million prize, the Guardian reports. The rather drastic catch of the show, which will be filmed around the clock and start filming in July, per Deadline: anything goes, even if "anything" includes a crime. "Each contestant gives consent that they could be maimed, even killed," reads an ad for the show. "Everything is allowed. Fighting, alcohol, murder, rape, smoking, anything." Interested parties have to be 18 and "mentally sane," will be allowed to bring knives (but no guns), and will need to sign a waiver.

Show creator Yevgeny Pyatkovsky believes the $165,000 price tag to "play" (contestants will also be selected via online viewer votes) will lure "rich and risky" participants, the Siberian Times reports. The players will get basic survival training by Russian special forces and will each receive a camera to document their time in a place populated by bears and wolves and where temps could drop to -40 degrees. There will be no crew, just 2,000 cameras scattered around the countryside. Pyatkovsky says 60 people have applied so far, including someone from the US. As for the potential for crime, the show does warn that the cops will be on alert. "You must understand that the police will come and take you away" if a crime is committed, the rules note, per the Guardian. "We are on the territory of Russia, and obey the laws of the Russian Federation."

 

[AlwaysWrite]

Might the 60 applicants be suffering from "brain freeze" (or "cabin fever")?

 

[MI2AZ]

What's weird is that when I read the article above, I thought I had already watched that show.

Did some research and found that there was a show similar to that that had aired previously and was probably the one I had watched.

Siberia

IMDB show list

Sixteen reality-show contestants, each hoping to win $500,000, arrive in a Siberian forest to take part in a reality show. Two are immediately eliminated, and 14 settle in for the contest. The unexpected death of a fellow contestant throws them off, but they eventually all accept it as an accident. Strange events continue to happen, and when a contestant is injured and no help arrives, they realize they will have to band together to survive in a land they do not understand. More unusual events happen that parallel the ones natives experienced 100 years earlier during the Tunguska event.



Review
“Siberia,” which premiered last night on NBC, looks and sounds like a reality TV show, but is not a reality TV show. Rather, it’s a fiction, a scripted series about a reality TV show that gets a little too real, having deposited 16 contestants in a dangerous, supernatural wilderness. In the first episode, the participants are flown by helicopter to remote Siberia. A hale Australian host— who looks, perfectly, like a mashup of Chris Harrison and Ryan Seacrest— informs them that they will win part of $500,000 — if they can make it through a Siberian winter. As if making it through a Siberian winter with just the clothes on their backs was not difficult enough, they will be living in an exact replica of the village of Tunguska, which was mysteriously abandoned in 1908: Spooooky. It’s like “The Blair Witch Project,” but instead of being made of “found footage,” it’s made of footage taped by a reality TV crew and edited by professionals, good news for people with motion-sickness. Judging from the first episode, the herky-jerky hand-held only comes out when someone is about to die.

“Siberia” is effective enough as a scary summer diversion, but it’s thrillingly Escher-esque if you start to track its internal logic. Networks fell in love with reality TV because it was relatively cheap to make, with its crap video look, no actors and small crews. “Siberia” is a show with actors and writers, but the same dodgy video and dialogue quality. When the host described the show as a “real life social experiment” that would give the contestants a chance to “start a new civilization” I wanted to high-five “Siberia’s” writing staff for so completely nailing the pompous, anodyne tone of reality shows. If “Siberia” were a reality series, I would never commend it for being so clichéd, but as fiction its unerring mimicry impressed me — maybe I’m a sucker, but flawless imitation strikes me as much more difficult than mindless being. Can this simulacra of the simulacra that is reality TV really be … less simulacra-ish? My heart says yes.

As on reality TV shows, the 16 characters on “Siberia” have broad-sounding jobs — bartender, model, grad student, computer technician — and hew to basic personality archetypes: the helpless nerd, the altruist, the super bitch, and the alpha male who refuses to help anyone, because, of course, he’s not there to make friends. (“Siberia” doesn’t let him utter this phrase, which is a shame.) If the show fails the sniff test, it’s by layering in callbacks and coincidences that don’t happen on reality TV shows — one of the guys thinks he recognizes one of the women from somewhere else — and in making the contestants a little too dim. (The women, also, are uniformly very young and attractive, a bias of fictional television much more so than reality adventure programs.) People are picked for reality shows because of their very strong personalities and verbal alacrity. They would be weirder and funnier and better problem solvers than they are here. When the super bitch, Esther, insists she is not sleeping on the floor — “Did you all hear me? I am not sleeping on the floor” — the other women don’t suggest rotating beds or drawing straws, which they would have. But at least Esther goes and shares a bed with the Montenegrin DJ Miljan, a consummate and creepy flirt who seems like he stepped right out of “Big Brother.”