8 Survival Shows Just To Watch While Making Squirrel Jerky

People talk about History Channel Only again, and not just because we’re all looking at the state of the world today and trying to get a head start on surviving an apocalypse. Season 9 is currently underway on the History Channel, and Season 8 is getting a boost thanks to its recent addition to Netflix.

Only remains the champion of reality survival shows, dropping contestants into various wilderness areas around the world with only a few items and no help. The goal is quite simple: don’t die! The winner is the one who lasts the longest without asking for a ransom. Contestants will have to find food and water, build a shelter, fend off wildlife and the elements, and also film themselves. But what should you watch if you’ve gone through all the episodes of Only? We’ve put together a list of survival shows to watch below.

If harsh survival reality isn’t your thing, what about harsh survival drama? from netflix Keep breathing It’s not real, but it’s heavy on survival when a lawyer (Melissa Barrera) ends up stranded in the Canadian desert when the plane she’s on crashes. Keep breathing it goes a little further than most Hollywood portrayals of solitary survival, from finding clean water to dissecting bear poop to discovering which local berries aren’t poisonous. Adding to the problems for her, and keeping her from giving up entirely, is the fact that she is (a minor spoiler) pregnant. The drama also flashes back to her life in civilization to give her a bit of backstory, but the most exciting things happen in the present. It’s not a great show, but Barrera sells it.

The granddaddy of survival shows is surviving man, which aired on various networks from 2004 to 2015, and really started the wave of people falling into certain death situations for our entertainment. Survival expert Les Stroud is dropped in locations from Canada’s unforgiving snowscape to Australia’s boiling outback in each episode, with a specific survival situation to overcome. It was particularly notable for being one of the first shows where the subject is also responsible for filming himself, which Only borrows from – really emphasizing true solo survival. Although a team would follow him from a distance, he was essentially alone. Stroud would later become surviving man on a Bigfoot hunting show for $some reason, but the early seasons are still some of the best survival series out there.

A direct FU to the blow Survivor, out of the wildSeason three took nine normal people with little to no survival experience and left them alone in the rocky wilderness of Venezuela. There were no staged challenges, eliminations, or immunity idols, and no hosts welcoming them to a tribal ceremony. Starting with very little, the team simply had to get from point to point, with various supply checkpoints and camps in between. It just so happened that those “spots” were in remote rocky terrain or on steep cliffs where a slip would mean a fatal fall. The inexperience of the participants provides more danger than other survival shows (it turns out that being an office manager doesn’t help much when you’re hypothermic), and more than half of the original nine bounce before reaching their final destination nearly a month later. . Season 3 is the only season that airs easily, but Season 2 is similar to Season 3 but set in Alaska, and Season 1 features four teams of 10.

Weather Only focuses on a single person against the brutal elements thrown at him by Ma Nature, 2020’s win the desert — the newest addition to survival television — takes couples into the Alaskan wilderness, where they compete against five other couples in survival challenges. It’s much more of a traditional reality competition series than Only, but it has a cool prize: the winners will inherit a beautiful three-story house, a landing strip, a guest cabin and a greenhouse that is 100 miles from the nearest road in Alaska. Current owners Duane and Rena Ose, the true stars of the show who built the airtight property on their own but can no longer maintain it now that they are in their 70s, will bequeath the place to whichever couple they deem most deserving. One thing that makes a difference win the desert from other shows is that you get to see various survival tactics in action, as each couple has their own strengths, weaknesses, and insights, but no one here is in any real danger.

If you can stomach the fact that sometimes Bear Grylls isn’t exactly as remote or in danger as it says it is, any one of Grylls’ many shows will satisfy your hunger for more. Only. But if you want to test your own ability to survive in the wild, Grylls’ interactive Netflix series you against wild is a unique twist on the genre that allows viewers to create life and death situations for Grylls. you against wild sees Grylls set off to different remote locations to complete missions, and as black mirror‘s Bandersnatch, when Grylls reaches a point where he can make a decision (for example, whether to eat raw seafood for sustenance), he presses a button on his television remote to choose one of two options. The fun part about this is that you can intentionally make Grylls hurt or sick while she learns a thing or two about how to handle certain situations. This is for newbies to survival shows.

Yes Only It’s too lonely for you, check out Discovery’s double survival, which pits TWO guys against the desert. The concept is very different from Only however, as the two contestants, who change from season to season, are survival experts with different approaches to not dying, and there is no competition… except for each other. Each episode presents them with a new location to survive, and double survival it excels at teaching you different methods to survive anything, with multiple options from the opposing ideologies of the two boys. double survival is what you look at to prepare to continue Only. (Gonna try for OnlyIt is not like this?)

there may not be a Only without the success of Discovery Channel naked and scared franchise, a series that took television by storm when it premiered in 2013… because people were naked in it. In each episode, the extreme survival series leaves a pair of strangers in the wild with nothing, and I mean nothing, except their will to survive, a single useful item, and their bare butts for 21 days. After becoming successful, naked and scared expanded the franchise with Naked and Scared XLwhich brought back series veterans in groups of 12 or more to survive for 40 days and 40 nights together for an entire season. SG remember more to Survivorwithout the silly games, while you can drop in and out of naked and scared since each episode is self-contained (unlike the contestants).

Oh sure, these contestants in Only it can withstand two or three months in the wild, but what about living mercilessly outdoors all its life? of history mountain men is part of the ever-growing “interesting people who live in crazy places” (or “crazy people who live in interesting places”) programming, following various people who live in far flung places like Alaska, Montana, Maine and elsewhere, to see how they cope with their daily lives as storms and predators pounce on them. It’s less about the minute-by-minute challenge of surviving on very little and more about months and months of surviving in the mountains. Possible bonus: there are some impressively gross beards in this show.

Only airs on Pluto TV (seasons 1-5), Hulu (seasons 1-8), Discovery+ (seasons 1-8), and Netflix (season 8).