It's true that Bear Grylls is an as-advertised military-trained survivalist, but there's a lot about Man vs. Wild that's less reality and more reality TV. In other words, some of the life-threatening fixes Grylls squeaked his way out of were super-duper fake.
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00:00It's true that Bear Grylls is an as-advertised military-trained survivalist, but there's
00:05a lot about Man vs. Wild that's less reality and more reality TV.
00:10In other words, some of the life-threatening fixes Grylls squeaked his way out of were
00:14super-duper fake.
00:16In the first episode of Man vs. Wild, The Rockies, Grylls is dropped off in the Canadian
00:21Rocky Mountains and left to find his way back to civilization.
00:24The episode features some of Grylls' most daring stunts, including a 70-foot jump into
00:29a freezing river and a rappel down a steep cliff.
00:32Then there was the lurking grizzly bear.
00:35Or was there?
00:36A spooked Grylls whispered,
00:38"'There's definitely something out here.
00:40I just heard a really heavy footstep out there, and I don't know.'"
00:43The Something walks right up to Grylls' shelter, and when Grylls dares to venture outside,
00:48he captures footage of a shadowy figure moving into the night.
00:51It looked like a close call with a bear, but spoiler alert, the Something out there was
00:56a Man vs. Wild crew member in a bear suit.
01:00According to the Daily Mail, a representative of the Discovery Channel claimed that the
01:04sequence was a prank on Grylls.
01:06Sure.
01:08In season one's episode, Sierra Nevada, Grylls is plopped into the middle of the Sierra Nevadas,
01:13arguably the most rugged and treacherous mountain range in California.
01:17After his parachute dumps him in the middle of a lake, he immediately acts to stave off
01:21hypothermia before nightfall, when the temperature drops dangerously low.
01:26And yes, Grylls built a shelter and didn't freeze to death, but he didn't need a survivalist
01:30handbook to manage it.
01:31We heard somebody complaining that they said, no, no, he's down the road at the Motel 6.
01:38He's not really out there surviving."
01:40According to Mark Weinert, a Man vs. Wild survival consultant who spoke with The Times,
01:44during many of the nights Grylls was supposedly sleeping in the frigid, forbidden woods, he
01:49was actually chilling at the Pines Resort at Bass Lake, in a hotel room with Wi-Fi and
01:54full breakfast included.
01:56So he was probably full of pancakes when he was depicted collecting a handful of stinging
02:00ants for his morning meal.
02:02Between stealth nights in a hotel on the Sierra Nevada episode, Grylls was genuinely awestruck
02:07when he stumbled onto four wild mustangs hanging out in a meadow, saying,
02:11"'I'm in luck.
02:12A chance to use an old Native American mode of transport comes my way.'
02:16This is one of the few places in the whole of the U.S. where horses still roam wild."
02:20That's right, Grylls decided to convince one of those wild mustangs to let him ride it
02:25— something even a seasoned horse person would rightly approach with caution.
02:29And ride the horse, he did.
02:31But before you marvel at Grylls' natural talent for horse whispering, hang on to your wonder.
02:36According to Weinert, the horses were ringers.
02:38Yup, they were rented for the day from a nearby operation that lends out horses for riding
02:43in expeditions and trucked into the wilds to be, quote, unquote, "'tamed'."
02:48More like Man vs. Rental Pony
02:51Season 1's Desert Island set Grylls up as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, stranded on
02:56a remote island, forced to use whatever he could find out there to survive.
03:00Grylls even compares himself to Robinson Crusoe at the outset of the episode.
03:04The thing is, though, it was no unchartered spit of land somewhere in the middle of the
03:08Pacific.
03:09According to Weinert, Grylls and company set up on an unoccupied outpost that was technically
03:14part of the state of Hawaii.
03:17As usual, Grylls builds a shelter to protect himself from sun, rain, and wind, then makes
03:21a spear he uses to capture a few meager bites of fish.
03:25But what we don't see is the crew wrapping for the night and whisking Grylls off to a
03:29Hawaiian motel for a solid night's sleep and a good solid meal that he didn't have to catch
03:34and kill first.
03:36Life got so pretend-hard-for-bear Grylls on that punishing desert island that he decided
03:40to brave the open sea in a ramshackle raft made out of bamboo stalks and palm leaves
03:45Built by himself, of course, because the island is deserted.
03:48At least, that's how it looks on TV.
03:50But while Grylls did build a boat with his own two hands, he had backup in the design
03:55department.
03:56The Times of London reports that before filming the sequence, Mark Weinert directed a team
04:00that designed and built the boat.
04:02The crew then took it apart, and Grylls rebuilt it with the cameras rolling.
04:07Season 1's Hawaii Mount Kilauea raised the stakes for both what the series could show
04:11and what Grylls could even handle.
04:13This time, he had to go above and beyond the usual chores, finding clean water and
04:17building shelter.
04:19He actually had to flee an active volcano, Mount Kilauea.
04:22In some truly harrowing sequences, Grylls appears to cheat death and conquer nature
04:26all at once, battling hot lava and toxic gas.
04:29Look at this, you can actually see the sulfur dioxide here seeping out of these vents."
04:35After an expose revealed that some first-season moments on Man v. Wild were staged, the series'
04:40original UK broadcaster, Channel 4, launched an investigation into the show.
04:45And they turned up plenty.
04:47About that volcano, for instance.
04:48In reality, there wasn't enough deadly magma around, so crew members brought in hot coals
04:53to make it look more frightening on screen.
04:55And as for the sulfur dioxide that hung in the air?
04:58Smoke machines.
04:59Early on, Grylls and Man v. Wild were outed for staging survival scenarios in Season 1
05:04while actually snoozing in hotels in between takes.
05:07Or as Discovery's legal team phrased it, isolated elements of some episodes were not
05:12natural to the environment.
05:13"...the point was you weren't misleading people, or was that the point?"
05:18From then on, the production team promised to be upfront about any fake danger.
05:22And they actually, surprisingly, walked their talk.
05:25In the Season 6 episode, Norway Edge of Survival, Grylls heads to the northernmost Scandinavia.
05:30In the absence of an actual, naturally occurring devastating windstorm, producers used massive
05:35wind machines to create conditions so difficult that they actually made Grylls cry on camera.
05:40A production first.
05:42"...you gotta stop it.
05:44Sorry, I can't, I can't get that far again."
05:49Once back to civilization, Grylls told the Los Angeles Times,
05:52"...they blasted the hell out of me, and I thought I could get a shelter and fire going,
05:57but I just got beaten by this thing and was really shaken.
06:00The emotion was there because I thought, the reality is, if you found yourself in this
06:04situation, you're dead."
06:07Thank goodness it was just reality TV!