You vs. Wild

A puffed-up version of Netflix's resident choose-your-own-adventure survival series, in which an electrical shortage has freed several African creatures from their fenced habitat and Bear Grylls throws himself out of a helicopter to save the day. My kids loved the shorter previous episodes and, appealing to my interest in feeding Grylls dung or callously hurling him to his death, talked me into trying the full-sized course this weekend. Lord, it's bad. I can appreciate that the very idea of a viewer-directed movie is inherently problematic, from both pacing and storytelling perspectives, and I'm willing to cut a little slack in those respects. Even Black Mirror had some trouble adapting their work to fit this quirky brand of uncertainty. Animals on the Loose is just so shallow, so forced and stupid, that I quickly reached my capacity for forgiveness. Clearly, Grylls isn't one of my TV favorites, and the show is thoroughly smeared with his particular style of dubious reasoning and gross-out Fear Factor showboating. He's barely off the chopper when he starts scavenging for food, reasoning that he'll need a protein hit to continue his search for the missing animals. Has he been fasting? That's the immediate priority? Eventually, we're asked to choose between a **** of plump red berries and a wriggling grub. That's indicative of the sort of quandaries we’ll face throughout the story. Our decisions don't really matter in a grand sense or, in cases where we may have been too reckless, merely lead to a short end-of-road acknowledgement before looping back to ask if we'd like to pick another option instead. The tech is easily confused, too: late in the story, as the whole family labored to stick with it to the end, the system failed to register that we'd already caught a runaway lion and fell into a recursive loop of continuous surprise attacks. We didn't have the strength to start it all over from the beginning. Final analysis: I managed to kill the host twice, but could not force him to eat poop.