UK Channel 4 Launches Brutal New Survival Show Apocalypse Tonight
Channel 4 launches new survival series Apocalypse tonighth as 14 contestants face 28 days inside an abandoned town without power, water or food.
Channel 4 is launching a major new survival series tonight as Apocalypse puts 14 ordinary people through an extreme 28 day challenge in an abandoned town. The new seven part series begins on Sunday 13 September at 9pm and strips contestants of the comforts most people take for granted.
The participants come from Britain and Australia and arrive with no running water, electricity or ready supply of food. Instead, they must work out how to survive together while finding shelter, securing resources and dealing with the pressures created by an environment designed to push them physically and mentally.
There is also a major twist built into the format. The contestants are initially divided into two separate groups, with neither side aware that another community is attempting to survive elsewhere in the town.
That changes as the experiment develops and the two groups begin competing for limited resources. What starts as a survival challenge therefore becomes something much more complicated, with alliances, leadership struggles and decisions over who controls what potentially becoming just as important as finding food and shelter.
Channel 4 describes the series as a modern survival experiment exploring what might happen when ordinary people suddenly lose access to the systems they depend on every day. Rather than placing experienced survivalists into the situation, Apocalypse uses people with very different backgrounds and personalities to see how quickly a new community can form.
For viewers who enjoy programmes such as The Traitors, Alone or more extreme social experiments, Apocalypse appears to combine several familiar ideas while giving them a much bigger setting. The abandoned town means contestants are not simply surviving outdoors but attempting to rebuild some form of functioning society from almost nothing.
