Bear Grylls in the Northern Territories.
News broke yesterday that Bear Grylls, the erstwhile host of the survival show Man vs. Wild, will headline and co-produce a new extreme adventure competition series for NBC. We’re hoping that Grylls will make competitors fry snake skin for tasty morsels, rig hammocks in the trees to catch a restful few minutes of sleep or reuse their own urine for hydration.
Whereas Grylls once took cameras—and viewers—through extreme conditions, showcasing his ability to evade certain death from the variety of perils that awaited him, the new NBC show will pit two teams against one another as they learn survival skills and teamwork. We’re not so quite sure what kind of precarious situations they’ll be put in or whether Grylls will need to show them how to find shelter in the desert, as seen below:
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And maybe NBC’s 2013 summer show, titled Get Out Alive, won’t feature contestants drinking things they wouldn’t normally consume:
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(MORE: Will Ferrell in Man vs. Wild)
But with show details still veiled, we hope the new reality show is much more than a more intense version of Survivor. There shouldn’t be any free buckets of rice. We want to see actual survival situations leaving the teams to use their own wits to find their way out, or their own food, such as when Grylls captured his own lobster or speared his own fish.
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If show contestants have to contend with even a handful of the challenges Grylls did during his seven seasons on Man vs. Wild, we’ll be pleased. (Eating the biggest, juiciest bugs known to man should be the easy part of the show.) We want to see them paddling oceans with makeshift rafts, scurrying down waterfalls, swinging across canyons on vines, hand-wrestling snakes and—our favorite—creating the most unique ways to duck for cover (such as when Grylls hollowed out a camel carcass to fend off an impending sandstorm).
In short, we hope for camel carcasses.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/S2qLNZcDWlk]
MORE: Alaskan Survives on Frozen Beer for Three Days While Stuck in Snowdrift