I think Mythbusters is my favorite show on TV. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are the geek kings, and they do things for a living that my friends and I would do for fun. That is, it’s what we’d do if we lived in a universe which gave us both unlimited time and resources, and that lacked liability insurance and trial lawyers. It’s an awesome show that has only gotten better over the years. But these days it’s got some close competition in my heart in the form of the new Discovery ‘reality’ series, “The Colony”.
"The Colony" is an attempt to simulate the stresses of a post apocalyptic world for a small group of volunteers that have been cordoned off in an industrial section of Los Angeles with no power or water. That in itself is a pretty cool idea, but that’s not what makes the show so watchable. What makes it great is the way the producers mess with them while they try to ‘normalize’ their world.
Before the experiment began, each of the participants was kept in isolation and denied sleep for 30 hours. Then 6 of them were put together and were allowed to loot an abandoned department store for 10 minutes taking whatever they could find that might be of use. Immediately following their looting session, they were set upon by a bunch of actors pretending to be other ‘survivors’ who threatened them and tried to steal their stuff. The show may be pretend, but from that point on I’m sure all the stress was real.
But the truth is we’ll never really know because we’re only given a description of these events at the beginning of the first episode; we don’t actually get to see any of it. And the reason for that is that all the things I’ve just described are the things that were done to these people before they ever really turn the cameras on. This isn’t the show… it’s just the preamble. It’s the things they did to get the participants in the right frame of mind before the show began.
When the show begins, our intrepid and already filthy survivors are forced to walk 8 miles along the cement wasteland of the Los Angeles river, part carrying and part dragging their precious ‘loot’, while they’re taunted by bike gangs and harassed by more actors with Molotov cocktails. Eventually, they are steered into an 80,000 foot “abandoned” factory where they are encouraged to ‘set up house’. It’s from here that the show actually begins. And we get to see our much harried participants try to solve the very real problems of water, food, and shelter with no resources but the garbage they’ve been hauling along with them.
Understand, I’ve just described the boring part of the show which is delivered to the viewers in the form of a 90 second description at the beginning of episode one. The fun hasn’t even really started yet.
All of these people are still more or less strangers to one another, but their individual skills have all been carefully chosen. They are an emergency room nurse, a few different types of engineers, a handyman, and a self defense instructor. They each have something unique and important they can bring to the post-apocalyptic party. But until a few hours earlier, they had never met so there is the expected conflict of personalities while they try to organize themselves. Then before they can really get settled into their new home, the producers throw them yet another curveball. Four more ‘survivors’ who are also volunteers and have been going through a similar sort of pre-show harassment show up at their door and want to join the crowd.
I think you’re beginning to get the picture of what these people are being forced to put up with.
What goes on after that is for the most part a bunch of very bright people trying to get back to some sense of modern normalcy without the benefit of water or power, and with their sense of security being deeply and continually messed with by an omniscient production staff. Its similar to the CBS show ‘survivor’ in some ways, only there are no bikinis, no one is voted off the island, and instead of running through a brightly colored obstacle course every other day they have to keep a bike gang from breaking in and stealing the last of their cooking oil and flour. It’s ‘big brother’ meets Mad Max.
There are silly elements to it as well. For instance while all the men in the show seem to have embraced the ‘we’re fighting for our survival at every moment’ suspended disbelief that the producers were going for, the girls seem to be a little more cavalier about it all. It’s clear that they realize that it’s only a TV show and if they get really pressed, there’s still a “Bobs’ Big Boy” about three blocks away that’s open all night.
But the guys are really getting into it. For instance, at one point a bunch of heavily armed “trader’s” show up to negotiate a swap of supplies, and the men involved treat the whole endeavor as if they’re all a second away from being killed. This highlights another of the silly aspects of the show. Sticking firmly to political correctness of their discovery channel hosts, no one inside the colony has any firearms of any kind.
In Africa where there are large sections of the continent who live with the same harsh conditions and virtual lawlessness that we’re shown in post apocalyptic Los Angeles, they have a very specific word for people who go around unarmed. They call them slaves… but sometimes they call them dead slaves. And in a situation like that, if someone showed up at your door armed to teeth and all they wanted to do was trade, the first thing you would want to trade them for is one of the guns. If it were me I think I’d be happily pushing the pretty blonde emergency room nurse into their truck in exchange for an AK47 and 200 rounds of ammunition.
But if you can get past the fact that a single teenager with a 12 gauge could declare himself king of this pacifist’s post apocalypse, its damned entertaining TV. The show may be totally put on, the stresses for the participants are very real, and just a few episodes in the signs of it are already showing. But in between all that you get to see some furiously bright people solving life’s most serious problems in terribly creative ways. In relatively short order they’ve reproduced a semblance of normalcy and have gotten far further than most of the world’s insurance executives, hairdressers, and tax accountants ever would. There is apparently no room in the post - apocalypse for people who can’t actually do something. So in this case the producers left those people behind.
I’m not a survivalist exactly. I don’t have a cave in the woods with 2 years worth of Ramen and a diesel generator, and I haven’t been bankrupting my family to prepare for a stellar object impact or the return of the back death. But I do manage risks for a living. So in that vein I’ve spent some time and energy learning about the likelihood of some of the large scale risks that exist in the modern world, and have taken some prudent steps to address those risks for my family. I’ve invested some real effort in learning about how societies fall apart in the hope that I’ll manage to avoid some of the mistakes that many others will likely make. And I've made a few carefully chosen investments in the kind of equipment and tools that will become much more valuable in a survival situation.
Speaking from that perspective, I don’t think ‘The Colony’ is a very realistic show at all. It would be years before the resources of the modern world turn into the rusting useless waste that makes up the environment for ‘The Colony’. Besides, when the government bureaucracy falls apart, other institutions will rapidly expand to fill the power vacuum left in its place. Those institutions that progressives have been doing their level best to dismantle for the last 100 years; things like family, and church, and local community, won’t just go away. Instead they’ll become the organizing principles of the new world. Man is a naturally social animal and our society is still held together by things other than the government. Even if the media elite would prefer we believe otherwise.
But like most things, if ‘The Colony” were more realistic, it would probably make for awful TV. And awful TV it’s not. And however much I might watch with a jaded eye today, deny me sleep for 30 hours and have a bike gang wave an AK47 in my face every third day or so and I’m sure I’d believe every second of it.
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