I'm really enjoying Mission Survive, it's a great way of doing it, bringing in people who are interesting characters and letting them have a crack at surviving; and then sending them packing when they fail. It's really different to other shows that send people home, because survival is literally life or death, it's not like not singing a song properly in an acerbic poser's opinion, this is literally the difference between living and dying. And Bear's far more polite than those characters tend to be.
Partly this show proves a point that Bear has made numerous times: very few people would survive in the wild, though most think they could.
At a ground level, it's not just the ultra-survival guy teaching survival skills, it's a group of people learning those skills for the first time for themselves, and using their initiative to keep going. It feels a lot more genuine to the average person because these are novices, and the learning they're gaining feels more relatable because of that. Equally, the fact that they're using their initiative shows that there isn't one answer to a problem, something that due to the constraints of time usually gets lost in translation in survival shows, where the expert simply does everything the best possible way.
Aside from the deeper, general societal implications, (and the thinking it generates about skills we've lost) the show is nicely paced, with challenging, interesting situations that the celebrities have to overcome. I always enjoy Bear's way of presenting information, teaching, challenging and encouraging people, he's a really good people person, and definitely embodies what he tries to preach: cheerfulness in adversity.
Really enjoying the show, and I only really knew Tom Rosenthal and (sort of) Jamelia and Mike Tindall. The other celebrities have been really good though, some arguments and disagreements were good drama and very human, and at other times they've all applied good teamwork and strategy, which can be really encouraging. And on that point, I think this does encourage you to learn more of the skills survival actually implies, it highlights the truth.
10 out of 10, between this, Born Survivor, Man vs Wild, and The Island with Bear Grylls, I think the man is just constantly producing excellent content. Keep it up Bear!
