A lot of television at this time of year is pretty cloying. It’s not that I don’t have time for any of that: I’ll watch the Gavin & Stacey finale, catch half an episode of Call the Midwife over my mum’s shoulder, that kind of thing. But I think there’s room for some counter-programming, when people have had their fill of cheer and goodwill to all men. So, something seasonal—by which I mean, set in a cold place—but which demonstrates the truth that often, when the chips are down, people are absolutely not lovely to each other. Let me recommend a show called Outlast.
Survival competitions have never been my thing. There’s something ludicrous about dudes in high-tech outdoor clothing chopping wood and putting themselves through a few bad nights’ sleep in the name of feeling more manly. But my sister came across Outlast during an evening’s aimless Netflix scrolling and insisted I watch it—because it “gets wild”.
The first series came out in 2023, then a second in September 2024. I binged them back to back, because I was recovering from surgery and didn’t want to engage my brain at all. This show is not good, I should add. It enjoys a 1.8-out-of-5 rating on Google. But I did find it curiously engaging. The conceit is this: 16 contestants arrive in the Alaskan wilderness and are sorted into four teams of four, called Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta, to see who can live in the wilderness the longest. The million-dollar prize is split among the winning team. There is no voting, no official process for players to get rid of their competitors, and there are no explicit rules for how the game should be played. If a player can no longer continue for whatever reason, they can fire a flare gun to be rescued. Crucially, no player can win on their own, they must win as part of a team.
The first series begins unremarkably enough. The contestants are given some basic supplies with which they must build a shelter, make a fire and start to gather whatever food they can find. There is something soothing about watching a bunch of people share seven boiled limpets while you’re full of everything from the fridge that was about to go off; the ice-cold rivers and lashing rain of a late Alaskan autumn make the comforts of your home seem even more comforting. There is also the satisfaction of seeing various macho guys, who started off by bragging about their outdoorsy credentials, crying to go home after a week struggling to shoot a single squirrel with a bow and arrow.
“You can go over there and set fire to their whole fucking camp”
In episode four, something changes. Now two weeks in, hungry and exhausted, Alpha team realises that there was nothing stipulating that they couldn’t sabotage and steal from the other teams. “Put your integrity on pause until we get home,” one contestant, Jill, a hard-bitten private investigator from Kentucky, tells her teammates. “You can go over there and set fire to their whole fucking camp.”
They don’t do this, but one of their number, Justin, does sneak over to another camp and steal a sleeping bag. “I’m gonna do it to the weakest one,” he tells his team. “That’s how I hunt.” For context, it is below freezing at night. From then on, as retaliations begin, the show descends into what one person refers to as Lord of the Flies.
This first series is exciting because you can tell that the production hadn’t quite anticipated this ruthlessness. One team manages to rope the camera crew into showing them their footage, so as to catch some thieves. In real life, if someone came and systematically dismantled your home, the result would likely be a physical altercation. That option is not available to the contestants, because they’re on TV, so we get scenes like one man, Javier, watching powerlessly as Jill rips apart his shelter in front of him.
Without parameters, the show becomes a vicious, open-ended argument among the contestants about what is and isn’t morally acceptable in pursuit of the prize money. Several people leave because they don’t want to play a dirty game and are appalled at the behaviour of their fellow contestants. Brian, a 59-year-old from Florida, is one of them. “I just can’t be a part of this circus of cruelty that’s going on here,” he says in voiceover as we see him holding his flare gun aloft. “Let’s call it a protest, I want people to know that there are good people in the world.”
Season two contains more of the goodness of humanity, presumably by the production’s own design. For instance, one man defects to another camp, is rejected, and returns to his original group expecting to be ousted and forced to “flare out”. Although the betrayal does hit his teammates very hard, they decide to take him back anyway. Instead of casting him out and taking his share of the potential prize money, they accept his failure to stick with them as a forgivable human weakness.
Fine, so it’s not all nasty. But my recommendation stands. If you’re after something refreshingly grubby at this time of year, Alaska awaits.
