Focusing on the Discovery Channel’s new series Naked and Afraid – which chronicles the experience of “one man and one woman [who] are stranded nude in hostile wilderness without food or water for 21 days” – Joan Marcus examines how she is both drawn in and repulsed by the genre:
Over the years I’ve watched everything from the 2004 makeover show The Swan, in which normal-looking women undergo radical plastic surgery and then compete in a freakish beauty pageant, to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, that grotesque excuse to mock the taste level and dietary habits of the working poor in rural Georgia. I teach a college pop culture seminar, and I like to write about pop culture, which gives me a handy excuse to indulge in reality dreck ad infinitum.
Shows are always upping the ante — increasing the shock factor, finding new ways to traffic in the risqué, the humiliating, the dangerous and disgusting. The more morally questionable a show is, the more likely I am to tune in on the excuse that anything this excessive has to be examined. I do like to think about how, in affording us the pleasure of judging real people in stressful and potentially humiliating situations, these shows palliate us — situating us comfortably in our own realities, reaffirming our cultural norms and making us more satisfied with our own lot in life. But of course my interest is not just intellectual. I’m as rabid a consumer as anyone, and shows like Naked and Afraid that push the boundaries of ethics and decency are on some primal level just a really, really good time.
Obviously I’m not alone here.
4.15 million viewers tuned in for the series premier of Naked and Afraid. The finale was the number one original cable show among women and men ages 25-54; a new two-hour special episode is set to air on December 8. The success of the first season isn’t surprising considering the provocative premise: a man and a woman who have never met, forced to partner up for survival and companionship without one stitch of clothing other than what they can find or make. They have to sleep in close quarters, in makeshift shelters, perhaps huddled together for warmth. They are survivalists, so most likely superior physical specimens who should make for pleasant TV viewing as they bathe in streams and lagoons, haul wood and tend fire and thrust handmade spears into the vitals of wild animals.
But Naked and Afraid turns out not to be particularly sexy. Those of us who tuned in for the nudity probably stuck around for something more troubling: The experience of seeing people at their most vulnerable under constant risk of bodily harm. It’s cringe-worthy, all that unprotected human flesh exposed to every threat imaginable, from sand flies and leeches to caimans and pit vipers.
“We’re just warm, pink, soft bodies,” Billy Berger complains in episode six as he slogs crotch-deep through the Louisiana bayou. “Everything … wants to take a bite of us.” Pinkness does appear to be a distinct disadvantage on this show. In episode three, filmed on a sun-scorched scrap of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Jonathan Klay burns brick red and spends days lying in the sand and moaning. His partner Alison Teal fairs better, suffering only debilitating menstrual cramps and the standard starvation and dehydration routine. I feel for Teal — two days of crippling dysmenorrhea would have me out of the game for sure — but all in all she does well in the Maldives compared to cast members in other episodes. E.J. Snyder steps on an acacia thorn in Tanzania and gets a gruesome infection in the sole of his foot — we see a stomach-churning close-up of the medics slitting the wound and draining the suppuration while he screams his head off. Laura is covered head to toe in sand fly bites, her entire body miserably swollen. Billy and Ky get trench foot. Kim falls deathly ill from bad turtle meat. Puma drinks contaminated water and is carted away on a stretcher. It’s like a live action version of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, so macabre it’s hard to believe all of this is really being served up as entertainment.
Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Edward P. Jones describes his fascination with reality TV and lurid Internet news stories:
INTERVIEWER: You’ve said that TV was a kind of company for you.
JONES: People pooh-pooh it, but on the court shows there’s something wonderful at times, and also awful. There was one episode, I remember, on Judge Judy. This handsome mother and her teenage daughter were suing another woman over two cell phones. They had seen them on eBay and what the woman ultimately sent them was a page showing two cell phones. The woman’s defense was that that’s what they were looking at, that’s what they got. The utter gall of people in life!
Other things I like to watch are true-crime shows—Dateline, 48 Hours. I’m fascinated by the awful, awful things that human beings do to each other. Just the other day, on Huffington Post—AOL is the page that my computer opens up to—a father took his six-week-old infant, because the child was crying, and he put her in the freezer. Luckily, she was saved.
I have been trying to help a friend of mine with her novel over the past few years, and what I noticed, and told her, is that she was failing to show the awfulness of human beings. I’m just fascinated by that father. Because I’ve never done a thing like that, could never conceive of doing that. To see people do these things—I don’t know, I feel blessed.
The Dish 