TV thoughts

Time in hotels has meant time to get refamiliarized with TV, something I did without for almost all of my eight years in Korea (to hear one of my mother's cousins tell it, I missed a huge chance to learn more Korean, and to learn it faster; he may be right, but Korean TV is just as crappy as US TV).

One show on the Discovery Channel that has caught my attention is "Man Versus Wild" featuring survival expert Bear Grylls. Grylls is plunged into the middle of a wilderness scenario with a camera crew and has to figure his way back to civilization using only his wits and very little equipment. As is true of a host of mountain-climbing documentaries, the camera crew shows a greater degree of intrepidity than does the host: they're basically doing what he's doing while also holding cameras!

I was a bit suspicious, though, of how much danger Grylls is really in during each show. His camera crew is right there, after all, and they're on hand to help him out if he gets into a truly tight spot.

A trip over to Wikipedia reveals that there has indeed been some controversy over the show's authenticity, but the UK producers of the show say, rightly, that neither Grylls nor anyone else has claimed that "Man Versus Wild" is a show about hardcore survival.

It doesn't trouble me that Grylls might not be in as much danger as he often seems, nor do I believe Grylls is an incompetent being falsely portrayed as some sort of superman. It takes only a viewing or two to realize that Grylls is a very impressive individual; the regions in which the show takes place are obviously real, not Hollywood studios, and Grylls doesn't have an easy time of it.

But if Grylls is obliged to conform to stringent safety standards for legal reasons, I have to wonder what the point of the show is. The Flying Wallendas understood that true suspense comes from doing your high-wire act without safety nets. This is probably why I can't get deeply into "Man Versus Wild": you know from the beginning that you'll never see Bear Grylls splayed atop a jagged boulder with compound fractures in both humeruses, trying to fend off a hungry mountain lion. The show is entertaining, but aside from that, what value does it have, especially on the Discovery Channel?

So I was reassured when I skipped over to that Wikipedia article about the show and discovered that "Man Versus Wild" has attracted controversy. Is the show supposed to be educational? Are people actually supposed to be able to follow Grylls's survival advice? If education isn't the point, then why does Grylls offer serious voiceover narration that includes facts about the region he's stranded in?

There's apparently another survival show out there; the host of that show is also the pitchman for the GPS Spot product that my brother David bought for me. This guy, from what I read on Wikipedia, doesn't bring a camera crew along with him. Good for him, I say! I imagine he just films himself.

I suppose I have survivalism on the brain because I'm on this walk, but believe me, I have no illusions about how I'd fare in the wilderness. My own purpose is to remain intimately tied to civilization and to enjoy as many of its comforts as I can along the way. As one of my old textbooks on comparative religious ethics noted, the Axial Period (that centuries-long period, defined by scholar Karl Jaspers, during which most of the major religious traditions came into being) coincides with a general planet-wide move toward urbanization: cities brought people together; intercommunication among various cultures led to an increasingly rapid cross-pollination of ideas, bringing into sharp relief the existential crises that shape and characterize the human condition, especially as the notion of the individual began to emerge. The formation of the great religions was accelerated in that crucible.

And except for increasingly small, isolated patches of humanity, we as a species haven't looked back. We are now massively urbanized creatures, which means that a guy who wants to talk religion with folks will, of necessity, spend most of his time very much on the beaten path. While I hope to catch a hermit or two, to meet some colorful rogues who rival the happy freaks we find in Tom Robbins's novels, I know that my greatest information resource is the huge, and arguably tame, mass of urban humanity.

That's me, then: Man Versus Mild.

[With thanks to Charles, whose recent "Smash Lab vs. MythBusters" post partly inspired this one.]


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