Tonight, Discovery premieres its latest survival series, The Wheel. The series dares six survivalists to tackle six wildly different South American ecosystems, rotating them from one environment to another at a moment’s notice. As an avid recapped of the network’s Naked and Afraid, I will be watching with great anticipation.
Each survivalist is dropped into each isolated location — Amazonian rainforest, island, wetland, tundra, bush plain or Andes Mountain — alone and equipped with a bare-bones survival pack and a S.O.S. device to be used to call for help. It’s up to them to source food, water and shelter, and at a moment’s notice (or as us viewers know — the changing of the moon’s cycle) each survivalist will be extracted and moved to a new environment. Their goal is to survive 60 days of this musical chairs-style survival.
Check out The Wheel
For the hearty folks who have survival skills and propensity for pain and suffering, The Wheel seems the ultimate test. The challenge is to be well rounded enough to survive in not just one extreme climate, but all extreme climates and flexible enough to adapt to sudden changes. A survivalist could be freezing one day, and sweating the next. Or plucked from a rain-soaked feast and thrust into a literal famine.
Could it be hard to watch? Probably. But will it be amazing to watch? Definitely.
I’ll be watching all of the series’ episodes and recapping them here (<-this link will be live after the first episode). I hope you’ll offer your thoughts, insight and commentary.
The Wheel > Discovery Channel > Fridays at 10pm ET/PT, beginning Jan. 13