The Colony: What The.....!!

[blockaderunner]

I honestly didn't know if this thread belonged in the Science and Technology or TV and Media, so I settled on here cause it seems to straddle both.

I started watching Discovery's The Colony because it seemed like a unique premise: Survivors in a post apocalyptic scenario using their wits and inventiveness to get by. But somewhere along the way, it just turned into a low budget version of Jericho with confrontation with outside forces and one another over "resources". And it's played up in such the cheesiest ways. That might not bother me if it wasn't for one simple fact: IT'S A FREAKIN REALITY SHOW!!!! With camera crews and directors who are probably bathed and well fed while these "survivors" are playing Mad Max. It's rediculous. Whatever scientific curiosity it had has been trumped by the faux drama. If I was one of those idiots and was hard up for food and clean clothes, I'd say "screw this!" and follow the camera crew to craft services. It's just bad now. And yes, I did stop watching. And the promos makes me glad I did.

 

[Scout101]

Eh, it's half entertaining, anyway. Way too staged and craptastic to take seriously, though. They're way too obviously being directed towards certain activities, inventions, etc. Some of them are neat, but no way you'd waste time and energy on them, though.

And they just finished day 47 or so of the experiment. If they were still in the LA area in real life, they'd be dead, or damned close to it. In any kind of situation like this, you'd want to be out of major cities as fast as possible. Population centers, especially ones THAT urban, have zero resources and tons of people, so the violence level would get ugly quickly. You'd maybe be able to get by for a couple of days collecting stuff, but if you weren't on the road by then, forget it.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

If they want to see people struggling to survive using only their wits and ingenuity, they should just make a documentary about people surviving in the favelas of Rio. Or refugee camps in Chad. Oh wait, that would be a bit too much "reality."

That show represents everyday life for the majority of people on this planet. How ironic that anyone would think to stage such a thing.

 

[blockaderunner]

Also, when you put it up against a show like Survivorman (my third favorite Discovery show behind Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs), where it shows a guy documenting his actual situation and doing it with a twinkle in his eye, it looks all the more rediculous. I get more info from Les Stroud's 7 days than in all the Colony's 47 days.

 

[FrontLine]

I gotta say I have been disappointed with the show as well. Its just so medicore and poorly executed.

 

[firehawk12]

Yeah, I've been watching this and while a lot of it is contrived (the whole premise itself, pretty much), some of the engineering is fairly cool.

 

[Scout101]

but so dumb and over the top. In this week's episode, for example, why were they fucking with the blimp/recon camera? Just climb on the frigging roof! They didn't even have enough rope to go higher than the roof anyway. But someone told them to do it...

 

[firehawk12]

Well, yeah. I look at it this way - making the trike was kind of interesting, everything after that was kind of BS. I don't know LA, but I find it kind of incredulous that they'd not encounter any people wandering around.

 

[Peter the Younger]

I keep watching for the engineering stuff (the solar trike was pretty awesome.) But yeah, the "dangerous" situations are so ridiculously stagey, I have to flip the channel. It's not chance that the thing is set in LA - the acting bug permeates that whole town, you can see half of them are hamming it up, probably in hopes of getting some future gig. The only thing I can figure is that the "colonists" have been promised some big bonus if they finish the show, but get nothing if they bow out or have to be rescued.

As for not running into other people, I'm pretty sure they cart them off to alternate abandoned locations for certain scenes (like the trailer park.) There is no way some basic cable reality show could grab a contiguous piece of real estate big enough to hold everything they have shown. And even if they could, it's friggin' LA: even in an abandoned industrial area like that, you can hear jets, helicopters, and traffic, you can see the city glow at night. No way those people aren't reminded constantly of where they are.

If they had made the disaster a nuke attack, and put the survivors way out in the boondocks somewhere, like out by the Salton Sea or somewhere in old downtown Gary, Indiana, that would have worked a lot better for me.