Both Big Survival Franchises Went International in the Same Year

History's thirteenth season of Alone put ten survivalists from seven countries into the Beaufort Delta and crowned a world champion. Discovery's answer, Naked and Afraid: Global Showdown, premiered April 1 and paired survivalists from Brazil, Australia, Mexico and the United States in a forty-day primitive bushcraft competition for what the network called the largest cash prize in franchise history.

Two networks arriving at the same format idea in the same year is usually a sign that the domestic version has run out of room. Both franchises have spent a decade generating variants — solo, extra-long, last-one-standing, apocalypse-themed — and nationality is the last untried axis.

Discovery's nineteenth regular season of Naked and Afraid ran from February with its own escalations, including two expert survivalists spending fourteen days on a remote island with no tools at all, and a challenge putting five social media influencers into the field to test their online personas against actual conditions. That last one tells you something about where the audience is thought to be.

The criticism levelled at Alone's world championship applies here too, and it is worth stating plainly: none of the competitors had won a prior season in their own country, so the title is a marketing frame rather than a tournament of champions. A genuine version would require national editions first and a final between their winners.

What actually improved is the country. Whatever you think of the framing, filming above the Arctic Circle through shrinking daylight produced harder television than another temperate season would have.