The Summit In The Media

[snarts]

The Summit

Reality Competition

CBS

September 29, 2024

Sixteen strangers embark on a 14-day trek through the perilous New Zealand Alps to reach a distant peak. Each holds part of a $1 million prize, but only those who survive the harsh terrain, Antarctic winds, and intense challenges will win. They face eliminations and twists from the "Mountain's Keeper," testing their morale and unity. Their greatest challenge is to stay together and reach the summit on time—failure means losing the entire prize.

https://www.cbs.com/shows/the-summit/

[SoMuchTV]

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Edited Tuesday at 12:34 PM by SoMuchTV
deleted - no longer relavent

[tv echo]

‘The Summit’ Host Manu Bennett Breaks Down Behind-the-Scenes Secrets: Safety Procedures and More (Exclusive)
By Yana Grebenyuk    September 29, 2024
https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/the-summit-host-manu-bennett-breaks-down-behind-the-scenes-secrets/ 

Quote

“They waltzed into that valley in the middle of this incredible terrain in New Zealand. I don’t believe that they knew as far as I was told. I was under the impression that they arrived without knowledge of being on a show called The Summit,” he revealed. “So they didn’t know that they were going to be scaling a mountain — that was going to be their surprise. And they didn’t know there was a million dollars involved.”

Bennett pointed out that the contestants “are not athletes,” adding, “These are just ordinary people. Like, one guy works at Trader Joe’s and nobody is a mountaineer. When you look at something like that, you try to figure out how is it possible? [The prize money] is a dream aspect for most people’s lives. That’s the big game changer. Suddenly you see the motivation.”
*  *  *
“On any of these mountains, you take a wrong turn and you go up the wrong side and either somebody’s going to fall or something’s going to fall on you. Gravity is probably one of the main determinants of our show — and people fall each season figuratively and literally,” he teased. “As far as safety is concerned, there was an international group of well-versed mountaineers involved in our show. We had one of the best coordinators of obstacle courses. … We had some pretty admirable mountaineers that were making sure that nobody stepped too far off track.”

Manu Bennett Calls 'The Summit' a 'Beautiful Social Essay'
Mike Bloom   Sep 29, 2024
https://parade.com/tv/manu-bennett-the-summit-interview

Quote

But, at the same time, much like the One Ring, the idea of greed is going to tempt people to want to act selfishly and turn on their own.
Who's going to be Samwise Gamgee? Who's going to be Gollum? I mean, listen, everybody for a second thinks about how they'll push somebody off a cliff. There's this moment of greed. And that's the setup. What is it about human nature that's going to make a difference between these 16 people, and who's going to make it to the top and who's not going to make it to the top? And I'm not a person who judges. I'm kind of like the underdog supporter. So, as we go up that mountain, I'm kind of wrestling, as I interview all these people each and every day. Who it is that's going to be that Cliffhanger moment where Stallone's holding onto that hand and the glove slides off slowly and somebody falls?

By the time everyone's gotten to know each other, there's a degree of honesty. Everybody tries to get the empathy; they tell this story. Eeryone's telling the hard luck story, and everybody's trying to survive and say how they can help manifest this climb up this mountain. Because, if you can't do it, then goodbye. So there's this kind of toing and froing. It's beautiful social essay. And again, when it comes down to humanity, I think The Summit is a great, a great way of watching human behavior and ultimately seeing how things either succeed or fail.

Edited Tuesday at 02:18 PM by tv echo

[ChiCricket]

@tv echo thanks for that article.

This part made me laugh:

"Bennett didn’t have any concerns while working on The Summit, joking, “Inherently the American productions have much more safety and much more in place than what we do in little old New Zealand where if you fall, you just hope you land on a sheep.”

[tv echo]

No One Told The Summit Contestants That They Had to, Uh, Summit
By Roxana Hadadi   Oct 2, 2024
https://www.vulture.com/article/the-summit-review-contestant-ignorance.html 

Quote

This blank-slate quality gives The Summit a grimly fascinating voyeurism — and prompts ageism and ableism in both its younger, slimmer contestants (who assume they’ll succeed automatically) and viewers (who might reflexively judge the older, less-thin contestants for their slower pace). “You must travel together,” Bennett instructs, yet the challenges are set up to sow division. Contestants who walk slower are blamed for reducing the group’s pace. At the first rope-bridge crossing, they must vote for a leader to choose which pairs cross the bridge together, a decision-making process that inspires comments on each other’s weight and size. On the second bridge, which individuals cross alone to lay down wooden planks for those who follow, one contestant says she’s too petite to handle the plank, while another says he’s so fit he can handle two boards. (He drops both.)
*  *  *
The problem with The Summit falling into a fat-thin, young-old binary is that, in reality, none of these people should be tasked with climbing through “lung-burning altitudes, a freezing alpine lake, and a dangerous glacial traverse” toward a “final icy ascent,” as Bennett puts it. I don’t think this show is going to kill anyone. But I do think The Summit is guilty of the exact flattening of a perilous experience Krakauer warned against in Into Thin Air, a first-person account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster that left numerous climbers dead and others stranded on the mountain in the middle of a devastating storm. Krakauer wrote about how mountaineering’s sudden mainstream popularity led people to believe they were physically and mentally capable of doing things they probably shouldn’t. Bubble-wrapping an extreme activity into something neat and approachable for a group of people with no experience makes for entertaining television that follows the rhythms of reality-TV scheming and strategizing. But when one of the series’s early villains, a 28-year-old woman bragging about how well she did on her SATs (suspiciously without naming the actual score), describes The Summit’s challenge by way of Legally Blonde — “What, like it’s hard?” — I can’t help but think, yeah, it probably should be.