Outlast : Au bout de nous-mêmes

I can't get over the idea that this is the most unconvincing attempt at faking reality TV.

I could almost see the story boards for each episode just off camera.

Its quite fun if you take it as a faked show, and it's easier then to swallow all the coincidences and convenient speeches that lead the plot into one unbelievable crisis after another.

Its also the only way to believe that any humans would behave like such a pile of evil creeps after only a couple of weeks have passed as the alpha team does.

I haven't seen the last two episodes yet but if this is as fake as I think it is then I'm expecting the baddies to lose and the goodies to win.

I'll give it four for its entertainment value but if its all true reality then I think I might just become a hermit and forget about the human race.

If you like to watch psychopaths trying to win a game and whining when they have to eat their own medicine, this is your show. If you are out for great Alaska footage and survival footage with great competitions, skip it. It is all about interpersonal drama and focuses on the creators of it. The creators of the show failed to make this a prestige show with great outdoor challenges. While it make sense to show the rivalry, it shouldn't be the main focus of the show. It just becomes a trashy show due to that. This show doesn't teach you anything about the wild, which I expected. Very unfortunate.

It's very, very difficult to not believe that this show has been set up using improvisational actors following a loose script and a designed plot.

Everything eventually starts playing out like a soap opera with endless convenient moments of discovery and character arcs that would be hard to swallow within fiction, let alone in reality.

Most suspicious of all is the fact that three such irredeemably-vile people as Jill, Amber and Justin would somehow end up on a single team and become soap-opera villains of the first order, complete with psychopathy and delusional levels of projection.

If this is actually real then it's the sort of thing that could destroy any viewer's faith in humanity. I can only hope that it's all a fake-out and that these three people are actors rather than monsters.

I'm up to episode 5, but don't think I'll go any further. As one of the competitors says before they decide to leave - 'this isn't the show I signed up for'.

It's either fake and mostly staged (which it certainly feels like), or it's real and pretty unethical on the part of the producers.

Why? Because they thought it might make good tv to invite a few 'criminal sociopaths' (as one of the competitors perfectly describes them) along for the ride. So you have around 3 groups of people who seem like decent enough folk, just trying to survive in the freezing wilderness....and another group of people who are absolutely awful. Bullying the other teams, stealing their gear etc. People who would surely be in and and out of prison in the 'real world'. The neighbours from hell. Don't tell me the producers didn't know they'd act like this.

Or they're all amateur actors, and it's staged. Some of the 'performances' are certainly hammy enough, and there's some awfully convenient 'coincidences' and unlikely occurrences. In which case, why waste your time?

I've long been a fan of survival series of all types. I was really excited by the idea of Outlast since it takes place in Alaska, and I expected that it would provide the opportunity to learn techniques of survival in one of the most difficult places to live primitively on earth. How cool, right? Yet this series is not about surviving the elements -- there were no discussion on fire building, shelter building, foraging, fishing, or much anything else survival related.

The series is an example of the worst of human behavior -- it is a foray into the evil that some humans will do to others out of greed, which includes -- theft, destruction, deceit, bullying, and mockery. The aggressive gameplay and manipulation was not fun to watch, it merely underscored how some humans can rationalize the harm they do to others -- and how others within their orbit will passively accept, resign without challenging, or turn a blind eye to the misdeeds to avoid confrontation.

I have to wonder if the creators of this show encouraged the behavior perpetrated by the private investigator from Kentucky? This woman has such a heinous unlikable aspect, yet apparently her underhanded behavior was completely acceptable by the producers of this series. It didn't violate the rules, so all good, right? No.