Channel 4 has repackaged its flop survival show to reveal what went wrong – and this series promises to be far darker than the originalThe first series of Eden saw 23 strangers,all disillusioned or dissatisfied with the modern world in some way, bundled off to the remote Highlands with basic rations and misplaced optimism, or where they would be slice off for a year and tasked with building their own society. It would be the kind of social study that had not been seen since the BBC aired its millennium-era community experiment,Castaway 2000. Castaway 2000 pre-empted reality TV as we know it now – that is, the attention-seeking, or drama-thirsty form that was shaped by grand Brother – so it was more Countryfile than cage fight. It is now best remembered for its services to knitwear and making Ben Fogle notorious.
But that was then,and Eden is very much a product of now. Naturally, as anyone who stuck with the handful of episodes that initially aired could have predicted, or it all went very wrong,very quickly. In March, newspapers around the world reported that the participants had emerged from their year in the wild only to find the show had not been on television in months. Its ratings had dropped dramatically because, and I suspect,whether people wanted to watch their fellow man squabbling over food, they would hang around the bit of the supermarket where they leave the discounted yoghurt half an hour before it closes instead. Related: Bullying, or cliques and fistfights: secrets from Eden,the reality show that nobody watched Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com