The Rundown: Extreme survival shows coming to TV; Friends to replace Neighbours
The latest genre of reality shows to hit our screens are like Survivor on steroids and they are already a smash hit overseas.
Fiona Byrne
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Australian Survivor started the trend but extreme survival tests are set to flood the Australian TV market.
With Survivor set to kick off filming of its latest season in Samoa next month, with a heroes and villains theme featuring the return of a number of former contestants, other shows set around a cast dropped in remote locations are coming to our screens.
Channel 10 has The Challenge, which is preparing to start filming in Argentina in August.
A reality/sport format, The Challenge has clocked up 37 seasons in the US.
Contestants compete against each other in extreme challenges to avoid being sent into elimination. The show requires a combination of physical strength, strategy and game play.
Ex-sports stars, Olympians, fitness nuts and the ever present rash of reality stars seem to fit the bill for this gig.
Next up Paramount+ is debuting the Australian version of The Bridge.
In this reality show, which is being filmed in Tasmania, 12 people will be dropped in the wilds and made to work together to build a 300m bridge in just 20 days. There is $250,000 waiting for the winner.
Finally, SBS has Alone Australia which is a true test of survival skills.
In the show, 10 self-reliance experts are dropped separately in remote locations with limited equipment and cameras to film their experience.
Isolated, alone and under stress, their challenge is to stay in the wild for as long as they can. The winner is the last contestant standing.
Meanwhile, Channel 7 has SAS: Australia returning for another season. Look out for celebrities being pushed around, thrown out of helicopters, dangling from cliff faces and punching each other when the new season lands sometime in 2023.
Everybody needs good Friends?
As the door closes for the final time after 37 years on Ramsay Street, Channel 10 has leant back on a musty old favourite to replace Neighbours.
Friends is being dusted off to run in the off-Broadway timeslot on 10 Peach where Neighbours has languished with few eyeballs and little fanfare for many years.
Part of the demise of Neighbours in Australia was the fact the show became all but invisible when it was bumped from 10’s main channel and dumped at 6.30pm on the network’s secondary channel Peach.
The old adage still rings true – out of sight, out of mind.
While the diehard fans still found the show, off-Broadway was never going to help the show survive or grow an audience.
Following the airing of the final episode of Neighbours 10 will show re-runs of Friends from 6pm Monday to Friday.
Friends was previously screening on 10 Peach at 6.30pm Fridays.
No shade on Friends and fans of that series, but it seems a sad sign of the times that first run Australian product gets so easily replaced by re-runs of a decades-old US sitcom.
Spicy reunion
Spice Girl Mel B has confirmed the legendary girl power group is reuniting for more shows.
And Australia is firmly in their sights.
“We are definitely planning to do more shows,” Mel B, otherwise known as Melanie Brown, said.
“I said it at the end of our 2019 tour ‘see you next year Australia’ and then Covid hit and everyone’s plans went out the window and now everybody is having to pick up from where their touring plans got destroyed.
“We are definitely planning to do more shows and Australia is a place that we really love so I am going to be sure we will come back here.”
Brown is the new superstar recruit to the celebrity panel on Channel 10’s The Masked Singer, which launches Sunday, August 7.
The show has allowed her to rekindle her love affair with Australia.
Such is her fondness for the country she wanted to call her youngest daughter Sydney, after the NSW capital, where she lived for three years.
“My eldest Phoenix was with me through my whole labour and delivery,” Brown said.
“I did say to her ‘you can name your sister, but I really do like the name Sydney. You can name her, but I love the name Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, Sydney,’ and she went ‘well, I want to name her Madison’.
“I lived here for three years and I have been coming backwards and forwards here for the last 25 years so I do consider this like my home from home.”
Brown said she was looking forward to catching up with her fellow “Spices” at Geri Halliwell’s 50th birthday party. Halliwell turns 50 on August 6.
“We have actually always joked that nobody does really know her real age,” Brown said.
“I am not sure (when it is) because her plans keep on changing. One minute it is going to be in the countryside in England, next minute it is in Ibiza, next minute it is in Italy, so when she actually makes her mind up then we can all plan.”
Channel 7 picks up some foxy ladies
It is yet to be confirmed but take it as a given the Kath & Kim reunion special will be seen on Channel 7.
The specials, there could be two, are to mark the 20th anniversary of the sit-com’s launch and are expected to feature plenty of outtakes and behind the scenes footage from the show’s hugely successful four seasons.
There will even be a sprinkling of new footage that was filmed earlier this year before the home in Patterson Lakes that was used as Kath Day’s house, was demolished.
Kath & Kim ran on the ABC from 2002 – 2005 before moving to Channel 7 in 2007.
The show is currently available on Netflix.
Hunting for another season
Take it to the bank, there will be a second season of the terrific new reality show Hunted.
Channel 10 has made no comment as to the future of the show, but based on the ratings for the first five episodes this show will be back for a season two.
The show launched on July 24 with 619,000 overnight metro viewers.
Seven days on that number has grown by 42 per cent to a total viewing audience of 1.217 million for episode one.
In this day and age one million total viewers is a more than acceptable benchmark.
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