Alone: The Arctic (History Channel/Netflix)
Jordan Jonas has had a successful day of trapping. His snares caught a whopping four rabbits, which he brings back to his bough-covered hut to skin and cook. While butchering, he notices that one has active milk glands. “You’re sort of obligated to try it,” he says, and slurps milk directly from the rabbit’s partly skinned corpse. A chirpy informational caption on the bottom of the screen explains, for the benefit of anyone who’s never drank fresh rabbit milk, that “it has much higher fat and protein content than cow milk.” In the unforgiving Canadian arctic, fat is the difference between life and death. “That is a lot of breasts,” Jordan comments happily. “It’s Dolly Parton the rabbit here.”
In the same season of Alone: The Arctic (History Channel/Netflix), we also join Jonas as he kills a 900-pound moose, butchers it with a Leatherman multitool, discovers that a wolverine has been stealing his moose meat, and then catches his nemesis in the act in the middle of the night in a bloodcurdling confrontation that culminates in the wolverine’s demise at the end of Jordan’s ax. This is not television for the faint of heart — or for vegetarians, no matter how brave. This is nature, red in tooth and claw, and we, the quarantined masses, are invited to experience it vicariously from the comfort of our bedrooms.
One would like to have been a fly on the wall at the pitch meeting during which Alone, a reality television show whose sixth season is currently streaming on Netflix, was conceived. The premise is so simple, so brilliant, so elegantly brutal: Drop 10 survival experts alone in the wilderness, and whoever endures the longest wins half a million dollars. The contestants can “tap out” by radio at any time, and a medical team intermittently visits to check their body weight and vitals and rule on whether they can be safely allowed to continue. In addition to clothing, each contestant can bring 10 items. (Most choose a bow, ax, saw, knife or multitool, tarp, snare wire, fishing line and hooks, pot or pan, sleeping bag, and ferro rod, in case you are wondering what to put in your bug-out kit.)
Our protagonists are universally impressive and eccentric in a well-adjusted kind of way. Jordan, the droll wolverine slayer, learned bushcraft from a reindeer-herding Siberian people, which proves useful in the Canadian far north. Woniya, a deerskin-clad “ancestral skills teacher” from California, initially comes across as a bit New Age-y but proves to be one of the toughest contestants. Nikki, a wilderness expert from British Columbia, suffers a series of misfortunes, including a self-inflicted arrow wound and a squirrel bite. Ray, a search-and-rescue canine handler and former police officer, is emotionally devastated after food desperation leads him to kill a chipmunk that lives near his hut. He has a nervous breakdown when he realizes that he has just murdered his only friend.
The austere beauty of Canada’s Great Slave Lake — pines, granite bluffs, rocky, inhospitable earth — becomes more oppressive as the episodes go on. The contestants are racing against the rapidly encroaching winter. As temperatures drop and nights grow longer, mishaps become less temporary setbacks and more existential threats. A fish slips off its hook at the last second, depriving someone of her only protein source in days. One person makes it to the final three only to have his hut burn down in the middle of the night. A successful hunter realizes that the animals he’s been eating provide only lean protein, meaning he is consuming thousands of calories yet losing a pound in body weight every day. More than one person gets violently sick after eating tainted innards.
In keeping with the reality TV tradition, cast members open up about their motivations, their fears, their Oedipal hang-ups, and how much they miss their spouses and children. Flashbacks show them in their previous lives. Unsurprisingly, several have military backgrounds, and all have day jobs as wilderness guides or outdoorsmen of some kind.
The more telling commonality is socioeconomic. In the course of the show, we learn that almost every single contestant comes from a background of hardship. Some are still too poor, as one man says, to afford a bus ticket to visit his father. Once you notice this motif, a lot becomes discomfitingly clear. What else but a childhood of rural poverty would explain why someone would have an encyclopedic knowledge of subsistence hunting by the time they’re a teen? Who would willingly endure weeks alone in subzero temperatures, hallucinating, losing one-quarter of their own body weight, unless they really, viscerally, know half a million dollars could change their life?
“As a kid, my family was homeless,” one contestant, Barry, says. “We lived in a van in a mall parking lot. My father stole a potato to feed us.” Later he adds, “The only thing keeping me going is the love of my family. … I want to be able to get a house, not rent. I want to pay off our debts. I want to take stress off my wife. … You [can] put a price on my life. Right now, it’s a half-million dollars.”
The middle-class contestants wash out; the ones who stoically suffer are those who can recite the exact amount of money, after taxes and down to the cent, that they stand to win.
Alone feels oddly suited to our current cultural moment, all the more so when a microscopic virus has brought industrial civilization to its knees. Despite its troubling subtext, the show is an incredible diversion for lockdown binge-watching, and arguably far more educational and substantial than most reality television. It is the pinnacle of the kind of weird, voyeuristic escapism at which reality TV has always excelled but alloyed with something darker and more primal and unsettling. There but for the grace of God go I.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
