Anyone seen Man / Woman / Wild?
I actually liked Man Woman Wild when it was on Discovery Channel.
I've been saying for the past decade here on site that more FBG's, esp ones with kids, should have more emergency supplies on hand and some basic training in the event of a disaster or emergency. Not that long ago, a lot of NY FBGs were suffering from the flooding there and the loss of power. What is often not discussed a few years back in Japan was how hard it was to find clean drinking water for many with so much of the core infrastructure in ruins.
The way I see it, some of the shows are structured for entry level viewing and to try to appeal to a much softer interest in the genre. If Man Woman Wild gets more wives and girlfriends and daughters and sisters to consider more active preparation for possible large scale emergencies, more the better. Unfortunately those who prepare for all contingencies out there, often they are negatively labeled like they are some hillbilly gun toting militia guy with 500 cases of MREs and 10 thousand bullets.
If you have to go out and try to find clean water, baby formula, maybe insulin or other needed supplies during a civil breakdown, that's your life at risk. You aren't going to do much good for your kids in terms of love, financial support and protection if you get stabbed to death by looters because you wanted some clean water when you could have stocked up during better times for not much cost.
I like Man Woman Wild and also Lost Survivors, their spin off show on the Travel channel. I could take or leave Myke Hawke, but Ruth England, his wife, I think does a really good job of showing how to manage conflict and survival with a novice. While she's probably not so much appealing to the hard core male demographic into these shows, she's a nice easy incline point for many women out there.
Ultimately the problem with all of these shows is there are a finite number of places you can go, scenarios you can explore, and situations you can show. I like Dual Survival, but it was needed to get rid of both original guys, which they did, to have new people cover old ground and keep the show sustainable. There are only so many ways you can improvise fire. Only so many types of weather conditions. Only so many types of shelters you can build.
I like Stroud, he's very realistic, and he's very respected, but his show is really tough to push to the mainstream.
Grylls is the most marketable, but wildly over the top and often what he shows is for entertainment, not actual teaching. I think his "interview" series, where he takes a celebrity on a short survival hike, is a better use of his talents. ( He ended up taking one of the LOTR minor actors up a mountain and it was more of an interview style show than a survival show)
I think the gold standard is still Ray Mears, who is a nice balance of teaching, entertainment and general mainstream appeal that is still respectful to the core themes of preparation. A lot of his stuff is still up on YouTube for free. A lot of Dave Canterbury's stuff is on YouTube for free as well. Outside of the 42 minute cable "show" format, the shorter YT stuff is much better for learning and presentation.
Naked and Afraid I find to be unethical. It's not a survival show, it's a rubber necking show. It's like asking the audience to watch a car wreck each week. They purposely get people with some training ( very little) and probably pick people they hope will mentally crack and then starve them and try to break them to see if they will crack. There is no learning here, nothing instructive, just a means to try to exploit people who still believe they can be famous from their ten minutes on TV.
A couple of short series that I think were well done was Naked And Alone with Ed Stafford ( which I think was the catalyst for Naked and Afraid as a concept) and Out of The Wild, The Alaska Experiment.
The reality is, if you are in a bad situation where you need to wing it and survive off the land and try for rescue, there's a decent chance you might be with others and others with no experience and no training. I think MWW is a good show to sort of accommodate that kind of thought process. If a show like MWW can impart maybe 1 or 2 good tips an episode and that might help someone stuck out there if they remember it, then I see the show as worthwhile IMHO.
