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It’s been more than 20 years since a group of people were left to fend for themselves and form alliances on a remote island, with the exception of participating in challenges, before lugging their Tiki torches to a voting station.

When the first season of Survivor aired, it was the golden age of reality TV.

Over the years, it became more and more ridiculous and overproduced before the tribe spoke and it was, for the most part, snuffed out.

Let’s not forget the South African version, which like every American reality TV show remade here, came with a whole new layer of cringe.

See The Bachelorette SA for the latest disaster on that front.

This brings us to The Bridge, a new HBO show narrated by James McAvoy.

It’s a social experiment that brings together 12 strangers from all over the UK with one thing in common. They all want to get their hands on a cash prize of €100 000 located 300 metres away on a small island in the middle of a river.

They have 21 days to complete this task by building a bridge, using a few basic manual tools and supplies.

The Daily Beast is calling it “the next Survivor“, while it seemed to trigger something deep in The Guardian’s Joel Golby:

I can’t make a bridge. I can’t tend to wounds or harness electricity. I don’t know how batteries work or what plants are poisonous or not.

When the world we’ve built collapses, and we rove the land in gangs with scrapped-together muscle cars, where will I fit in? “All right lads,” I’ll say to the de facto leaders who will emerge from the scorch, “does anyone need any typing doing?”

Existential crisis aside, you can see the similarities to the OG stowaway show:

It’s all there, from the mandatory “I’ve never done something like this before” to divisive surprise tasks that pit the contestants against each other.

Then there’s the classic talking head statement: “I’m here to win” as if anyone had their doubts.

The appealing thing about the show is that it has that fresh feeling that we got from the first few seasons of Survivor, before it became more of a competition to see who could get the best post-show entertainment deal, rather than a quest to win the prize.

I’ll give it a try, if only for the drama.

Watching British people trying to calmly navigate fraught emotions in reality TV shows is always amusing.

[sources:guardian&dailybeast]