Race to Survive

From the previews of Race to Survive Alaska, I saw that it was much like the three seasons of the excellent (even if sometimes staged) Ultimate Survival Alaska, even having some of the same wild and demanding locales and a promise of "elite athletes". RSA largely succeeds in the scenic filming, but fails in both its casting and editing.

"Elite athletes" is an exaggeration for most of the cast; even the best of them would not match the caliber of those in Ultimate Survival Alaska and many other similar shows. Worse, most of the cast are insufferable, with the editing playing up bickering and hurt feelings and speechifying. And since RSA is under the NBC banner, it is edited to be quite wõkë, with the expected tribal "representing" of the perpetual victim groups. Here, unbelievably, Max (who has a white mother), when he finds that he is the last "black" person left, says he is the last "person of color"; the Inupiaq Oliver and Wilson might disagree.

In a good survival show, I can root for one or more persons or teams; here, every pair was either off-putting or so-so, so I did not really care who won. And one final note: I'm quite tired of actors and especially narrators with affected frontal pronunciations, i.e. Lisps.