Netflix won’t let you ‘kill’ Bear Grylls in breezy quest
Netflix’s first high-profile foray into interactive television was with last year’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an intricate caper that, true to Black Mirror’s gloomy branding, doubled as a fulmination against the futility of existence. The sales pitch ahead of its release was that Netflix was bringing a Choose Your Own Adventure-type format to the screen. Yet as refracted through Charlie Brooker’s dystopian prism Bandersnatch was more Choose Your Own Way to Be Depressed About the Pointlessness of Life.
As follow-up, Netflix has gone in the entirely opposite direction by strapping survivalist Bear Grylls to the front radiator of its interactive viewing format. In You vs Wild,
Grylls is the anti-charlie Brooker: gung-ho, fond of puddles, more likely to crack open an iphone and stick the battery down his underpants for warmth than ruminate on how our devices are turning us into drones.
He brings his questing spirit to all of the eight episodes of You vs Wild (available at once). Where Bandersnatch was a blackhearted labyrinth, a nasty fright around every corner, Grylls’s take on the format is breezy and snackeable. Each adventure starts with a helicopter dropping our hero off somewhere vaguely wild and dangerous. There are ravines to be negotiated, crocodiles and wolves to be faced down, potentially disagreeable foodstuffs to be foraged.
What there isn’t – and this may disappoint sofa-bound sadists or people who just don’t like Bear Grylls – is any death and destruction. Grylls has said that he expects many viewers will try to send him to a sticky end. Clearly there’s a limit to how sticky he’s prepared to get for our amusement.
Grylls, it becomes quickly, crushingly apparent, can’t be “killed” on screen. In a later episode shot in some unidentified European wilderness – the series is frustratingly vague regarding its settings – he, for instance, contracts a nasty dose of food poisoning after being instructed to feast on something iffy by the viewer (sorry Bear). If this was Black Mirror the closing scene would be of the indestructible outdoors man wheezing his way to an untimely end. But Grylls simply radios his helicopter and is lifted to safety. We don’t even see him throw up properly.
Nor is there much in the way of storyline. Part one has the fearless presenter searching for an aid worker somewhere in a South American jungle. Later missions include delivering medical supplies and locating a stash of poison antidote in the desert (your first choice: parachute in by plane or travel by helicopter?). So though lives theoretically hang in the balance the stakes feel low. The agony that audiences felt when asked to reach a decision in Bandersnatch is absent.
But the lack of intensity turns out to be a strength. Grylls isn’t taking any of it terribly seriously. Even in a tricky situation – such as when forced to wrestle a crocodile because you made him do something hair-brained – his chipperness never evaporates. He’s treating this as a lark at Netflix’s expense and that boy scout bonhomie is infectious.
One complaint about Bandersnatch was that, as a game rather than television experiment, it was halfbaked. The same criticism can be levelled here. As with Bandersnatch, Grylls will stop every so often and, looking into the camera, offer two options – sleep up a tree or in a cave, for instance? You have 10 seconds before Netflix picks for you.
The difficulty is that the choices feel completely random so there’s no sense of achievement when you select the right one. I “won” an episode by ordering Grylls to fight a wolf – actually he merely shouted at it a bit and waved a stick – but it is easy to imagine a scenario where the other option of running away would have been smarter. Bandersnatch, because of its originality, could coast on novelty alone. Second time around, the weakness of the interactive format is more exposed.
Yet it would be unfair to hold
You vs Wild to the standards of mould-shattering television. From Grylls’s devil-may-care brio to the modest length – choose wisely and you can get through an episode in less than 20 minutes – this is a throwaway distraction fully aware of its inherent silliness. Approached in the same spirit and it’s a walk on the wild side that just about justifies your time.