I really _want_ to like this show.
That was true before I started watching it, and it's true now that I've seen the first five episodes.
It's not that I've seen a ton of survival shows--I haven't seen anything that Bear Grylls has done yet, for example. But I did love Les Stroud's Survivorman. And in general, I really like documentaries done in an infotainment style. I love travel and adventure shows. I'm a huge fan of Expedition Unknown. I'm a huge fan of River Monsters. I'm also a big fan of a bunch of science-oriented infotainment documentary shows. I love Mythbusters. I love Outrageous Acts of Science.
So when I saw advertisements for this show, it seemed right up my alley.
Unfortunately, after five shows, I'm not at all convinced that it wasn't intended as a mockumentary. It's a bit more enjoyable when you think it might be a put-on with comedic intent.
Hacking the Wild is quite formulaic. We begin with host Andy Quitmeyer traveling to some exotic locale with a tale of people "recently" being stranded there. In every show but one so far, supposedly they managed to survive for four days prior to rescue. Why does Hacking the Wild claim they stranded for four days? Because that's how long Quitmeyer will be stranded. It's the formula of the show.
The raison d'etre is that Quitmeyer is going into the wilderness armed with some technological gadgets and absent some of the normal gear one would have. He's going to adapt the technological resources to aid his survival.
Upon arrival, Quitmeyer first meets with a "survival expert" (they all come across like rather amateur actors instead, but maybe they are who the show says they are). The same thing always happens in these scenes. The survival expert says that Quitmeyer is crazy to head into the wilderness with what he has in his pack. Quitmeyer meanwhile gives them a gadget for monitoring his progress.
The items that Quitmeyer does and doesn't bring with him are fairly ridiculous. No one is going to head deep into the Alaskan wilderness without a compass. And no one is going to into these locations loaded with lasers, servos, chemistry kits, a big array of gator clip leads, etc. On top of that, he never seems to have any power problems, even after three days in harsh weather. So that part doesn't seem very realistic or very useful if the show has instructional intent.
On top of that, the things that Quitmeyer builds with his tech often seem both ridiculous and woefully under-explained. He frequently builds some crazy Rube Goldberg-like contraption without showing very well just how he's building it or just how it works. At least he doesn't do this in a manner where anyone watching could be expected to build this sort of stuff themselves, unless they could do so without needing to watch Quitmeyer in the first place.
But there are bigger problems than this. For one, Quitmeyer comes across as if he has zero practical, common-sense survival skills. I don't know if that's an act for the show, but there's no way that someone would go into the wilderness while making the decisions that he routinely makes and not wind up severely injured and/or severely ill followed by severely dead. It often seems more like you're watching an old Jerry Lewis film--"Jerome in the Jungle" perhaps, as Quitmeyer bumbles his way through the dumbest decisions ever regarding how and where to travel and what risks to take.
It doesn't help that Quitmeyer does not come across as very likable. He seems rather weaselly and nerdy. "Nerdy" can be endearing, of course, especially to other nerds, but Quitmeyer seems rather like the kind of nerd who always wants to hang out with you even though you keep avoiding him.
Another problem is that you often do not get much of a sense of Quitmeyer making progress. Days will go by where he apparently doesn't travel at all, for example, even though the overall plan is to travel to a specific location. This just leads to the sense of the show being staged, not really the scenario that it's claiming to be. It's simply as an excuse to build those Rube Goldberg contraptions as an idiot savant.
Another huge problem is that Quitmeyer is clearly not stranded in the wilderness alone. He has at least one camera/sound-man with him. This is unlike Survivorman, say, where Les Stroud demonstrated at least once just how he filmed the show. Here, occasionally they try to give the impression of Quitmeyer filming everything himself, but the show is loaded with obvious shots from a separate cameraman, as they pan the camera, zoom in and out etc. from a distance. Some shots are also obviously drone shots, but Quitmeyer is never shown operating the drone. He'd have to be operating it to get the shots they're getting.
So it's never really believable that Quitmeyer is stranded at all, or that he only has the resources that he's showing on camera when it comes to food and water for example. Of course, some of the scenarios he's placed himself in so far would have been far easier to get out of anyway, merely by sensibly hiking in a known direction. Quitmeyer's stupid on-camera decisions often seem designed to make his situation worse and enable more gadgetry.
It doesn't take much to start laughing at Quitmeyer and the show instead, much like you'd laugh at "Jerome in the Jungle". There's also a bit of Gilligan's Island to it--Quitmeyer is both Gilligan and the Professor rolled into one. Seen as a fairly subtle mockumentary, there is more value in Hacking the Wild, but it's still not a great show. I'll be surprised if it lasts very long.
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