At the same time, however, we're optimists: Even the worst doomsday scenarios our video-game programmers invent have survivors, and just like we all believe we're the next American Idol, no matter how tuneless and lumpy and spectacularly unfit for mass consumption we may be, we're pretty sure than when the Great Simon Cowell in the Sky finally pulls the plug on humanity's pitchy audition, we'll be among the elect getting tickets to the postapocalyse.
But even among the lucky ones there will be winners and losers, those who will thrive in a world where grabbing lunch is suddenly much more complicated than pointing at images of photogenic french fries, and those who will perish shortly after the final Wal-Mart is picked clean. Look to the couch potatoes to see will inherit the earth—or at least the ones who've been watching Survivorman, that is. (And if the show's unfamiliar to you, please start exercising frequently, get all your shots and indulge in a salt rub now and then—you're the ones we'll be eating first, and we'd like you to be as healthy and savory as possible.)
For the uninitiated, Survivorman is a reality series that debuted on the Science Channel in 2005 and now airs in reruns on the Discovery Channel. (New episodes are scheduled to start running next month.) In each episode of the show, a 44-year-old Canadian wilderness instructor named Les Stroud ventures to some remote, inhospitable locale—a frozen icepack in the Arctic Circle, a leaky lifeboat off the coast of Belize—and stays there for seven days, alone, as he struggles to stay warm, find food and water, and create an entertaining TV show. Except for a few useful items (a flint stick and a multi-tool in one episode, a blanket and an axe in another), his provisions consist mostly of the 50 pounds of video gear he must lug around to document his solo adventures.
Essentially the plot's the same every time. The weather sucks. Disgusting creatures (scorpions, lake snails) get eaten. Stroud battles dehydration, exhaustion, boredom and loneliness, and spends more time delivering somber, late-night soliloquies than the most sad-sack Survivor castaway. But at least he's got real reasons to complain. He has to start every fire himself and hunt or gather every calorie he eats. There are no tribe members to assist him, no immunity challenges to motivate him—only the occasional rush of impending hypothermia or the nearby presence of hungry polar bears break up the bleak monotony of extreme survival mode.
In jittery times like these, when apocalypse seems near but affluence and technology keep us at a deep remove from day-to-day survival skills—remember how two of final four castaways in last season's Survivor could not even start fires even when given matches?—the calm confidence that Stroud displays on Survivorman has made the show a cult hit. In his two years on the air, Stroud has not only endured the most unforgiving terrain of all—the cutthroat world of contemporary TV—he's thrived there.
He's even spawned an imitator, Man Vs. Wild, another Discovery Channel show, which began airing in November. A flashier, more theatricalized and stunt-driven version of Survivorman, it stars Bear Grylls, a former member of the British Special Forces whose list of accomplishments include successfully summitting Mt. Everest at the age of 24 (he was the youngest Briton to ever do so), navigating the North Atlantic in an inflatable boat, and hosting a formal dinner party in a hot air balloon nearly 25,000 feet above the earth. (He and his two companions are now the world record holders.)
In contrast to the everymannish Stroud, who's balding and a little paunchier than you'd expect a guy who subsists on scorpions and squirrel bones for a week at a time to be, Grylls is Central Casting's idea of a professional adventurer, Indiana Jones by way of James Bond. He's younger than Stroud, he's buff, he has a plummy British accent and when he, say, digs into the rotting bowels of an animal carcass to retrieve some squirming, protein-filled maggots, he consumes them with dashing joi de vivre. (Even after squeezing a huge globe of fresh elephant dung over his mouth to slurp up the water it contains, he maintains his stylish aplomb. "Not one of the better drinks I've ever had," he tells the camera.)
To a certain extent, the absence of equipment is driven by verisimilitude. Disasters catch us off-guard, and the meager gear Stroud and Grylls work with are supposed to approximate that. But while it's true that a wrong turn in a snowstorm can turn a weekend vacation into a life-or-death struggle for tourists anticipating no greater challenge than figuring out the best local radio station to listen to, how many casual travelers are there, really, in the super-remote and exotic locales where Survivorman and Man vs. Wild are set? Presumably it takes more than a missed exit to end up on a polar icepack or deep in the jungles of Costa Rica ... But while the inclusion of state-of-the-art equipment would make the shows more realistic, it would also rob them of their metaphorical power. On the surface, both Survivorman and Man vs. Wild ostensibly address everyday disasters, like surviving a plane crash in the middle of a frozen forest, or getting lost in the desert. On a more symbolic level, though, what they really depict are end-time scenarios where GPS units have stopped working, batteries are no longer available, and the worldwide PowerBar supply has been completely exhausted. And as much as they focus on specific practical rules and advice—to keep cool in the blazing hot desert, pee on a T-shirt and wrap it around your head—their most important lessons are more fundamental. Stay calm. Stay hopeful. Perservere. Even though all that's left of the world is a couple of fishhooks and a Swiss Army Knife, all is not lost.
Indeed, not since Gilligan's Island has catastrophe seemed so Edenic. For all his midnight grumbling, Les Stroud clearly loves the austere serenity of the world's harshest places. (Telling data point: When he and his wife got married in the early 1990s, they chose to have the ceremony on a frozen beaver lake, then spent a year together living in a remote Canadian forest trying to replicate life as it was lived 500 years ago.) And Grylls gets positively euphoric every time he stumbles across a fresh zebra carcass from which he can scavenge a few mouthfuls of meat.
In the end, though, the post-apocalyptic optimism of Survivorman and Man vs. Wild rests on a foundation as shaky as a city-slicker's first lean-to. Death is an ever-present undercurrent on both shows—Stroud and Grylls routinely reference people who've died in the places where they shoot their shows—but their upbeat message is that you don't have to, you can survive, man will beat wild ... as long as you're willing to accept elephant dung water as the new Gatorade for a few days. But what happens when the avian flu really does decimate half the U.S. population in a month, and we really do run out of oil, and global warming turns the entire country into a desert? No matter how much they love the depopulated, primitive landscapes they temporarily inhabit on their shows, Stroud and Grylls are always more than ready to return to civilization at the end of their journeys. When that option disappears, however, and depopulated primitive landscapes are the inescapable norm, will our finely honed survival skills prove just as useless as our gasless SUVs? One imagines the taste of fresh squirrel bones isn't quite so life-affirming when the prospect of a pizza tomorrow no longer exists.