The Colony

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.

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'm no fan of reality TV, but I make an exception for The Colony, because it's more meaty. The scenario is that a viral outbreak has devastated Mankind, leaving relatively few survivors. The volunteers for the "experiment" are 10 individuals with diverse backgrounds, and we get to watch as they attempt to survive in an admittedly artificially constrained environment: a cordoned-off warehouse in L.A.

Two things make the show special. First, the group is so immersed in the situation that the emotions are real for them, which is fascinating. Second, they do builds that are interesting and sometimes amazing.

From comments the participants have made outside the show, it's fairly obvious that things were about as real as they could be, within this totally artificial situation. On the Discovery forums, Mike the mechanic wrote:

"WE...and I say this again,,,,,,,,WE had NO HELP from crew or anyone else!!!!!!!!!"

You can almost hear him shouting. And on his blog page, uber electrical engineer John C. wrote:

"One thing I really loved about the show was that everything they showed that worked.. actually worked.. if it didn't work.. they'd show that it didn't work.. That was really important to me."

Despite this, the director was not content to just sit back and watch things unfold naturally, and instead prodded the group with events, such as actors playing the role of raiders. This sometimes comes off a bit silly, but at least there are no stupid contests.

It's a show that some love and some hate, so your mileage may vary.

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?

A question that many of us ask, but few seriously consider, is what would the world be like after society collapsed? The Colony, a reality television show on Discovery, addresses just this, and I have to say it far surpassed any expectations I had for a reality show.

In both seasons, The Colony takes a group of a dozen people or so, each with a specific skill that may or may not be useful for survival—electrical engineering, medicine, even modeling. They tell these people that a virus has wiped out 90% of the Earth's population and that they must band together to try and rebuild society. They start with the basics like food, water, and shelter, but as the season progresses, the survivors get more creative and intricate with their colony and start building things for self-defense and electricity. Season 1 took place in an abandoned warehouse in Los Angeles, while season 2 was in a hurricane-ravaged neighborhood in New Orleans. Though the colonists obviously know they aren't in any real danger, the obstacles they must overcome are very real, and it only takes them the first few days to forget that they are, in fact, in a reality show. If society was to collapse as described in the show, I think The Colony offers a genuine look into how people would respond to the stresses of rebuilding society.

This post-apocalyptic reality show is as real as you can get without putting the contestants in any real danger. They're pushed to their limits, and never once does the crew step in to help them. Actors are even hired to harass our colonists, as gangs and marauders constantly attack the colony, never giving the survivors a moments rest. The Colony is recommended for survivalist fanatics or any person looking for an original, realistic reality show.