How Does ‘Extracted’ Work? ‘Hunger Games’ Meets ‘Big Brother’ Series Explained by Expert
Preview
Here’s a sentence you never thought you’d read: The Hunger Games meets Big Brother in Fox’s Extracted. Are you hooked yet? So are we.
Premiering Monday, February 10, at 8/7c, this brand new reality competition series sends 12 amateur survivalists (and they really mean amateur) alone into the wilderness while two of their loved ones fight for resources at a nearby “headquarters” about five miles away from their camps. The goings on in the wilderness and HQ are filmed through a 24/7 live feed, leaving the families to watch in fear as their loved one faces the cold Canadian landscape completely alone in the hopes of winning $250,000.
The fate of each untrained contestant in the wilderness lies in the hands of their family members, who have the power to decide whether their loved one has what it takes to brave the elements and fight to be the last one standing, or whether the family members will push the ominous “Extract” button and remove their loved one and their whole family from the competition. What sets this new series apart from similar shows like Survivor or Alone is that the competitors doing the actual surviving have little to no control of their game. The social experiment aspect of Extracted is asking if your family and friends can be trusted to keep you “alive.” That will prove difficult when your family members don’t believe you have the skills to keep going.
FOX
You’ve seen survivalist shows push individuals to their physical and emotional limits. Extracted offers the chance to see what it’s like when your family takes the test with you. As Megan Hine, survivalist expert and Head of Extraction on Extraction, explains to TV Insider, “Just because you’ve got your family there doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a support network.”
Hine is a wilderness guide, adventure TV producer, and survival consultant whose work you’ve seen on numerous Bear Grylls shows and other survivalist reality series. Her degree in psychology makes her area of expertise the psychology of survival. On Extracted, you’ll see her on-screen when players are pulled out of the competition. She’ll be in the yellow extraction helicopter (or boat if the weather is bad for flying) with her team as they collect the eliminated players. Hine says that Extracted is a “fascinating” look at the human mind. (See a clip of Hine dropping a contestant off in the wilderness in the video below.)
“When we look at people that are in a survival situation, there are two fundamental things that seem to stand people out from those that walk out of a situation, those that just sit down and wait to die. Those that often thrive in these situations or come out the other end often have the ability to have an element of control over their situations,” Hine explains. “So whether that’s creating a routine in their day, to going and getting water at the same time every day, doing something in their camp at the same time, and having that sort of routine where they’re on top of their personal admin because they then got some sort of control rather than it just all being unknown and overwhelming. And then the other part, which was really important, it was really interesting, was knowing that you have a strong support network, even if you can’t see them or interact with them. Knowing that at home you’ve got this support network, whether it’s friends, whether it’s family, that was one of the defining factors of those that survive vs. those that don’t.”
She hints that there are players this season who don’t feel that support network back in headquarters. And while she can’t confirm this, it seems possible that some family members might try to take their loved one’s place in the forest. Whether that would be helpful or a betrayal is in the eye of the beholder.
FOX
The survivalists are completely alone during the competition; production set up their camps far away enough from each other — and instructed that players must keep to their designated zones at all times — to make sure there’s no chance encounters. But that doesn’t stop encounters from the animal wildlife. On Survivor, there’s always a camera and safety crew standing by (especially during the physical challenges) and in clear sight for the contestants should anything dangerous happen that warrants intervention. But there are no camera crews at the survivalist zones on Extracted. Everything is filmed on those cameras strapped to trees. Hine, however, assures that her team is situated close enough to all of the campsites that they’re easily and quickly reached by helicopter in case of emergency.
Back at headquarters, the families face their own challenges. The teams must compete for resources to send to their loved ones, but there’s no challenge on the first night of competition. The survivalists are dropped off at camp with a backpack containing one waterproof jacket and a thermal layer. “The first night they weren’t given anything at all [other than that backpack], so they had to figure it out,” Hine says. “It was quite a cold night that first night, so they literally just dropped off with nothing, and then had to source things from the natural world around them.” All their families could do was sit and wait for a chance to fight for tools to send. But as viewers will see, most of the families went to sleep on night one and didn’t leave someone behind to watch the overnight feed. This will change over the course of the season.
What happens at night “was totally up to the families,” Hine says, “and again, this is why it was so fascinating. Some people were just absolutely glued to their seats and probably were really struggling in the headquarters and others might just bury their head in the sand. It was interesting seeing people’s coping mechanisms when they knew that their family member or their loved one was suffering and how they dealt with that or if they even cared.” You’d think that choosing to go on a reality competition series such as this would make it impossible not to care — your actions are not only determining the fate of your loved one’s game, but are also being watched by viewers at home, after all. But that’s where the social experiment comes into play. Some people, as Hine explains, react to these high-stress scenarios by completely ignoring them and not allowing themselves to care. But the show doesn’t let them sit idly by at all times. The challenges for resources are designed to rile up the competition.
The challenges “were designed to test them” physically and emotionally, Hine explains. Some challenges test both simultaneously. The stakes are raised by providing the families with biometric data from their survivalists’ watches, making it so they “watch their loved ones, basically their body breaking down over the weeks that they’re out there.” She says that the families develop “a lot of strategy” over the course of the season to help their loved ones and win the money. Any good reality competition show gives players the chance to band together with other competitors, because that can lead to betrayals that make great TV. Hine implies that Extracted‘s families could steal resources from other groups. “There’s a lot of opportunity to form alliances, but there’s also a lot of opportunity as well for subterfuge,” she warns.
Another detail that raised the stakes: The series didn’t want players to have too much time to prepare, as you wouldn’t know you were going to be marooned in a real survival scenario.
“The casting process actually plays into the side of not allowing them much preparation beforehand, because the casting process is quite a long process,” Hine reveals. Some players found out they were cast just “a couple of days before we were due to start filming,” she says. They wanted that element of being “whisked from their everyday lives and just dropped out there, some of them with zero preparation at all.”
Hine was there when each team waited for their survivalist to be picked up by the Extraction helicopter at the start of filming. She describes what it was like to watch these players be plucked away from their loved ones and thrown into the unknown in what she calls a “high-octane experience.”
“The family have been dumped at the end of a helicopter landing site, and they don’t know that there’s a helicopter coming in. And suddenly I appear in this helicopter and grab one of them and strap them in,” Hine recalls. “The doors are off, and it’s the noise and the wind through the cab, and they’re suddenly in the air and just dropped off, literally throw them out of the helicopter at the other end, fly off. This person’s like, ‘What the heck just happened there?’ And suddenly there’s silence. There’s nobody there. Alone. And that’s when it’s like, oh sh*t, what have I done? That first night is fascinating to watch.”
Much like the families back at Extracted HQ, viewers might find it hard to look away.
Extracted, Series Premiere, Monday, February 10, 8/7c, FOX
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