Siberia

The reality show has become a nightmare, which isn’t a terrible premise. But setting it in the woods and turning the contestants into prey for some malevolent force harks back more to “Friday the 13th” than to “Survivor.” This wouldn’t be as noticeable if Siberia leavened the whole thing with dark humor.

The well-trod format of Siberia may be its biggest asset, quickly building the kind of sturdy perimeters that horror so often needs; real fear emerges when the familiar and predictable become shockingly distorted (is any ghost as scary as a child ghost?).

Siberia can be pretty annoying with the shaky single-camera and fake reality premise and all--but then it picks up in the last ten minutes when things go horribly wrong and the best character in the bunch gets killed off.

Written and directed by Matthew Arnold, the pilot does a nifty job of capturing the tics of such unscripted programs, from the convincing casting and first-person interviews to the shaky camerawork and overhead helicopter shots. In fact, the producers have done their mimicry a little too well; it’s easy to zone out on the blah, blah, blah of the contestant banter while waiting for the twist to actually happen.

Poorly acted, drearily written, Siberia is just the thing for those who've tuned into a new reality show and, while watching the same old beats play out, muttered to the screen, "I could have written this."