The Utopia Dutch Reality tv series comes to America

This topic isn't about the very fine BBC Utopia series which is being rebooted in America, and they'll probably ruin it. That definitely deserves it's own topic.

Instead, there's a Dutch tv series called Utopia in which many people competed in order to be on the show. It's a social experiment in which they must use their abilities at primitive skills to fabricate the things they need, with of course the ability to fabricate more modern and postmodern items to best effect.

It sounds great, but there are limited English translations of very small clips of the original series. It's a huge undertaking in America, budgeted at 50 million in US dollars, so probably something entirely different. Any comments from those who speak Dutch about the original series, or from people interested in the new series?

Most survival or preparedness shows suck. They either take a definite expert and place them into the wild for several days, and he demonstrates his prowess. And this has redeemable qualities as an educational and instructive show, but actually survival and preparedness are two separate phenomena and are philosophically different.

Ridiculous shows take an avowed self-proclaimed expert, who then miserably sees that his/her skills are not up to reality, and we watch them implode. This happens on the worst of the bunch, Naked and Afraid, in which survival becomes a contest of starvation while naked, and seeing people completely unable to cope with purifying water. The fact that they're naked only enhancing the stupidity because of a huge number of bug bites and damaged soles from blisters, cuts, and infection.


The best of the bunch are the Alaska Experiment, or Out of the Wild: Venezuela in which a diverse group of willing subjects of varying skill levels attempt to LIVE in a wilderness area (not survive), are trained before-hand by survival experts and locals, and then must make do for three months, and then make it back to civilization following an arduous journey.

Or there's the Colony, a sort of successful formula (in the first season) in which a trained scientist and two craftsmen ended up creating a dune buggy, flamethrowers, a form of simple Morse code transmission, cannibalizing tech from construction zones (like solar energy panels), etc and so creating comfort in spite of an apocalyptic/dystopic situation. Subsequent seasons 2 and 3 were pale reflections of the first one. That show reminded me of some creative people I used to work with.

Utopia sounds like the latter, so I'm really interested in something more like the Alaska Experiment/Out of the Wild with elements of the first season of the Colony. It's not an embracement of the Luddite philosophy, not something akin to the Amish or Mennonites, but a melding of science with primitive agrarian skills...and frankly fascinating to me.

well its on fox so if its good it won't be on for very long. im gonna go with none of the things you just said and say its just gonna be another mediocre reality show that may last for one or two seasons, probably the former