The Colony

I was intrigued by the premise of this show, but quickly became turned off by how contrived it is.

I'm willing to suspend disbelief and accept that everyone in the group (or nearly everyone, since the marine biologist is pretty much useless) is highly skilled and trained in a field that is tailor-made for the situation. I guess in the post apocalypse no run-of-the-mill folks manage to survive and come together.

That being said, the ideas that the Colonists come up with each week strain credibility pretty far. I could buy it if every once in a while someone had an unusual solution to a problem, but when week-in, week-out they come up with elaborate solutions, I call foul. It all seems very contrived and likely fed to the Colonists by producers.

The second major problem is the appearance of needed materials. The Colonists apparently picked the greatest abandoned warehouse in the world to inhabitant. The warehouse miraculously produces whatever is needed to finish a project. Again just a little too contrived for me. The Colonists were never faced with abandoning a plan or doing something more simply because whatever they needed was magically found in the warehouse.

I'm guilty of watching the entire series. Once I watched a couple episodes, I felt I needed to finish it out. But, the last several episodes, my eyes were rolling quite a bit.

I found the first season very enjoyable. It was like a survival-themed Scrapheap Challenge - an intelligent/skilled team, engineering the solutions to problems with somewhat limited resources.

Yes, it was a very silly that they conveniently found everything they needed, and their builds worked first-time most of the time, but still, it was enjoyable viewing.

The role-play elements were a bit rubbish, 'fighting off' bad guys - but not too distracting.

Sadly, with S2, it degenerated into fairly trashy reality TV, less engineering/building, a less likable/less intelligent group of survivors, and far more shouting, bickering, and far more bad role-playing.

I liked the premise of this show when I saw the preview and so decided to give it a shot. While the first episode had some slightly over-the-top moments, I wrote them off to a bunch of new people all being nervous/excited on camera and trying to ham it up.

I invested too much time into the first few episodes and now I'm stuck until the finale, and the bad acting and ridiculous scenarios have gotten worse. This show is obviously choreographed, with multiple camera angles and edits during 'tense' moments. One can only assume that a director is yelling 'action' in-between takes.

If you don't like the idea of Bear Grylls being 'presented with situations' and having the availability of 'off-camera experts' to assist him, then you certainly won't like this show (in fact it has the same disclaimer). What's funny is that Man v Wild is actually more believable to me.

Do I want people to get killed on camera? No. But if a girl is a poor engineer, and she attempts to do something that would result in failure, then I expect her to NOT be helped. Show the failure. If a guy is doing something dangerous, then fine, jump in and stop him. But don't then go and teach him the right way so that he does it correctly, just cut him out of it completely. If The Colony never gets lights because there are no qualified electricians, then leave it at that.

Nearly every ridiculous *presented* task is successful. Is it too much to ask to simply want to see people pass or fail a task at the same rate they would in real life? Now THAT would be exciting TV. I want to see real ingenuity, not science projects guided step-by-step by the off-camera instructor.

This is reality-lite.

OK, so I'm just going to make this short: The premise is that it's essentially a live action role play scenario.

That said, I think that what most of the reviews have missed so far is that the whole point of this show is to demonstrate a series of actual tasks that *might* have to be accomplished by survivors of an apocalyptic scenario. Yes, some of their successes are a bit far fetched, but to be real, that doesn't make for an entirely compelling narrative. We're not talking about Survivor, we're not talking about realism here. What we're experiencing is a social experiment of a variety.

The first season was more believably populated by people who I would trust in a survival situation, definitely. The second season is markedly less about actually skilled members of the team/colony and more about the psychological make up of a surviving group. Both seasons are compelling because they address many of the questions inherent to survival/post-apocalyptic films and fiction. Would a ragtag group be able to pull it together enough to make it through day-to-day? Would they be able to use enough common sense and basic knowledge to complete complicated and confusing tasks? Could they, ultimately, rely on one another for survival?

Would it be interesting to have it crewed/cast entirely by people who would be useful in a survival scenario: of course. Would it be likely or even realistic for that to be the case: Of course not.

As for staged scenarios, I really can't argue much on that, except to say it makes sense to have tasks be staged as well as to have the raiders and non-colony members be actors and have their reactions staged. That's part of the whole experiment, to demonstrate what's actually going to happen to social reasoning and our understanding of cultural imperatives.

I guess, to once again sum up, I'd say this: If you're looking for something that is compelling and true to life, set up your own colony with your own friends and see how it goes. If you want to see something that's as informative as entertaining, just watch the show and understand you're not watching Survivorman, you're not even watching Man vs. Wild.

This show was fantastic, and if you liked season 1 season 2 is much more exciting. Several survivors in a staged disaster scenario then have to actually survive off the land, a million times more realistic than Survivor. Action packed, twists and turns, makes you feel you lived through it all, again amazing amazing show. This show makes you question, how prepared are we really? What would you do if you had to find water and food near you? Would you be empathetic to others if you had food and they didn't? at what lengths would you go to protect yourself and you family? The Colony is a great ride from beginning to end and ultimately makes you wonder could I survive?