Monsters of Television

“We’ve got intruders!”

A couple of weeks ago, I was dozing while watching some special on History about death masks, and in between my dozing and finding out that George Washington was vain, I saw promos for the The Colony, a show on Discovery Channel. Judging from the promos, it was the answer to the question many started asking after Survivor had gone through a few cycles: “Why isn’t there an urban survivor? Let’s see them try and eek out a living in a rough neighborhood.” And some producer heard that idea, liked it, and, being a producer, added, “Let’s make this rough neighborhood actually a ‘safe zone’ after something pretty apocalyptic has wiped out most of the human race!”

Thus The Colony was born.

I wasn’t aware, when I saw the promos, that the series had actually already done a season last summer (I don’t watch a lot of Discovery Channel, History, etc.), but as it’s a reality show, and only in its second season, there’s not a huge need to go and catch up on season 1 (though I can grab the last 5 if I want). Already with one episode, I kind of get the jist of what each episode will be like.

Part of the challenge of a show like The Colony is that it kind of needs a bit of imagination to work. Sure, we can say this about every television show, but The Colony really needs it. These 7 people aren’t actually in a post-apocalyptic world, and at the end of the 50 day “experiment” (whatever that means) , they get to go back to their lives as artist/inventors, teachers, models, mechanics, etc. No loved ones have been lost (though they may be missed), and no one is really infected with the nuclear flu (based on a presumed mutation of the avian flu).

Despite this, The Colony is fairly easy to get sucked into because of how well it trades in pop culture tropes about an apocalypse. The colonists, uninfected by the nuclear flu, are left by VOPA (a government response group) in a supposedly safe zone, with limited supplies and shelter. From there, the colonists work together to create a water filtration system (river water poured through sand and charcoal and then boiled), make a fire pit, decide on a place to live, and dig into some instant food packets.

So we’ve got those basic survival tropes down. Then we need the scary band of outside survivors, potentially infected, who will arrive in the safe zone and try and steal supplies. And they do. The outsiders are Mad Max and zombie film like in their “raids,” moving in large groups and armed with pepper spray and smoke bombs. They never move en mass against the colonists (there’s only 7 of them, after all), but most of them seem pretty active. I don’t know how serious these fights are (the raiders are allowed to use physical force if necessary), so another stretch of the imagination is necessary to find any stakes in these raids.

But boy do these folks sell it. An amount of playacting is needed from the colonists as well, to really sell the idea of the post-apocalyptic world, and whether through pop culture tropes or too much reality TV, people fall into roles. George is the lay-about (he takes a nap on the second day!), Reno is the hard-worker, Jim is the volatile one moving between kindness and anger pretty quickly, and so on. How much of this is prepared before the show and by casting, I don’t know, but everyone does a decent job of making it work.

We’ll see how far The Colony goes, though I can imagine this show getting fairly repetitive after  awhile. As George points out, what’s the point in gathering food and supplies if they’re just going to get stolen? And what’s the point in watching if that’s all that’ll happen each week?