Say it ain’t so, Bear!

The New York Post has an interview with a former consultant from the riveting Discovery Channel show, Man vs. Wild, who says the show’s host, Bear Grylls doesn’t really have it as rough as it would appear.

Mark Weinart, an Oregon-based survival expert, told the Post:

“If you really believe everything happens the way it is shown on TV, you are being a little bit naive.”

According to Weinart, the survivalist spent some nights in a cushy lodge with the show’s crew when he was shown on the show to be staying, of course, in the wild in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California.

I guess I’m not awfully surprised by this, if not a little disappointed. What a viewer has to consider when watching a show like this is that the production has every advantage in portraying reality in any way they wish. If they want to make it look like he has to make a makeshift hut out of sod or narrowly escape a death by yetis, they can do that regardless of whether or not the danger was that imminent or if yetis are real.

I still find the show and Grylls impressive, I’ll still watch it when it comes on (my girlfriend will still roll her eyes when I do) but I think now every time you see something on the show you have to wonder if it really happened that way.

For my money, I like Survivorman. Les Stroud is a poor man’s Canadian Bear Grylls.

Tuesday’s Line

No, seriously…

The French government has installed two toilets at the top of Mont Blac, Europe’s highest peak, which will have to be emptied by helicopter.

Great white sharks apparently don’t like kayakers.

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Response from last night’s YouTube debates is in. (New York Times/Time Magazine’s TV Blog/Jeff Jarvis). To be honest, I didn’t find this all that spectacular. The questions were predictable and kind of average. They certainly were no different than any question posed to the candidates during a traditional debate. I’ve decided that while I think Obama is the more viable candidate and certainly someone I would vote for, I love Joe Biden, even if he puts his foot in his mouth — a lot. Oh and as anyone who watched last night will tell you, Sen. Mike Gravel is nuts.

Premiere Magazine’s list of 10 TV shows that should be movies.

Is Netflix in trouble?

NBC is being sued after someone caught on Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series killed himself. While it is difficult to argue with the intent of this series, as a journalist, I do not feel in any way that reporters should be doing the police’s job for them and making the news. It was really only a matter of time before this happened.

Teen Vogue to fold? Where will LC “work?”

Part 2 in Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 Best Love Songs ever.

John Mayer addresses the 63 fan arrests at his gig in Hershey, Pa.

The Cinematical on how much a critic should spoil a film when writing a review. When writing reviews and when we did the Industry Outsider podcast, I tried to always be respectful of the readers and listeners who hadn’t seen the film. To not do that, in my opinion, is an arrogant and pompous things to do because at that point you are not writing the review for anyone else, you’re writing it for your own self-satisfaction.

TiVo to debut a $299.99 HD DVR. Nice. I think this will prove to be the right price point for this product.

CBS’ Public Eye on how the internet has become the destroyer of financial models.