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Discovery is about to leave eight people in the wilderness for 42 days, bringing nothing else, but the clothes on their backs for a new live television event. The show will be a live event, wherein they are monitored day and night – just like in Celebrity Big Brothers.
Survival Live is going to air two episodes each week -- one pre-recorded and one live. Fans of the show will be able to see the contestants via a 24/7 Web platform, detailing their biometric data, which will show who is having a hard time. But, this reality show will have its twist as contestants also have the option of asking viewers for help. Each survivalist must be able to build a social network which they can ask them to get something for them.
Like in the previous version, each week the weakest contestants will be evicted from the challenge in a live episode. Survival Live -- a sort of Naked and Afraid with clothes -- is going to be shown soon after this year.
“It's a really fascinating opportunity to take one of our strongest genres, survival, and mash it up with a live environment, but also do it in a very social and digital way,” Eileen O'Neill, group president of Discovery and TLC Networks, tells THR.
The network already has live versions of multiple series, which includes American Chopper. And O'Neill has made a priority of showing live stunts because the pay it much higher than normal TV shows. Austrian jumper Felix Baumgartner's gave them an added 4.2 million viewers when did he jump from the stratosphere, while Nik Wallenda's high-wire walk over the Grand Canyon gave them an additional 13 million viewers last summer. Wallenda will perform another stunt, but the location is still unknown.
Survival Live (working title) is created for Discovery by Adjacent Productions. The contestants will be drop off somewhere in the Pacific Rim, as stated by O'Neill.
The success of unscripted adventure shows that include Survivor, Amazing Race and Discovery's Naked and Afraid (wherein a male and a female contestant are dropped in the jungle with no food, no water and no clothes) has thrilled contestants eager to test their skills and possibly achieve (temporary) TV stardom through the survival competition TV show. But O'Neill noted that only those with experienced will be included.
“We have a lot of people who want to test their mettle on our survival shows,” she says. “These are pretty rugged environments, so we do background checks and psych checks, and that reduces the pool to choose from pretty quickly.”
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