Not unlike the religious creation myth of Adam and Eve, the origin story of the TV show Alone begins with two bare-assed adults wandering amid a bunch of trees.
“After Naked and Afraid premiered on Discovery in 2013, a lot of buyers started to ask the question, ‘What is our version of the show, but not naked?’” says Shawn Witt, an executive producer on Alone and the president of Leftfield Pictures, the production company behind the program. “Like, if Naked and Afraid is the contrived, loud, billboard version of a survivalist show, what's a more authentic, producer-removed version?”
Tapping network contacts at History Channel, where Leftfield had previously launched Pawn Stars and American Restoration, Witt and his colleagues set about brainstorming their vision. Then tentatively titled Survival 365, the initial concept was to see if survival experts could live entirely alone in the wilderness for a full year while filming everything themselves. The response proved enthusiastic enough to pursue development, though some spitballed changes threatened to move the project away from its bare-bones, stripped-down foundation.
“There were early conversations on our end, and even from the network, about 'Should we make this a Hunger Games format where they think they’re alone, and all of a sudden, marauders come in and steal their shit?'” Witt says. “Someone even suggested, ‘Do we drop goats from parachutes that they can then slaughter and eat?’”
Fortunately, the finished product is a far cry from its more gimmicky predecessor. Now nearing the end of its 11th season, which concludes on Aug. 29 and is shot in Canada’s Northwest Territories above the Arctic Circle, Alone hasn’t changed much over time either, adhering to a uniquely primitive premise: 10 contestants, each carrying 10 carefully chosen items of gear and dozens of pounds of camera equipment, are dropped by themselves into different areas of the same remote wilderness. Last person standing wins $500,000.
Like Naked and Afraid, the overarching challenge of Alone is laid out in the very name. (The switch from Survival 365 came as Leftfield ditched the year-long objective, having deemed it both financially cost-prohibitive for production and entirely unrealistic for contestants.) Contestants have exited the show for a range of physical reasons since its 2015 debut, from starvation to disease to freak injuries; on the first episode of the current season, a full-time homesteader and bowyer from Missouri named Cubby Hoover was forced to call for a medical evacuation after stabbing himself in the leg with an arrowhead that had fallen out of his quiver. But just as threatening is the mental toll of going without human contact—aside from the show’s crew members who visit every 7-10 days to perform medical wellness checks and swap out camera memory cards and batteries—for so long.
At its best, Alone offers something of a meditative experience for regular viewers like me, full of long sequences in which people wax about life while they chop firewood, weave gillnets, or simply walk the land. And yet the flip side of their solitude is always inescapable too, often combined with malnutrition to loom over campsites in lieu of producers and camera operators, and rummage around the mind of an isolated psyche.
“Yes, we're there from a safety and survival standpoint,” Witt tells me near the start of our recent video-call conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. “But we're just facilitating lifelong dreams for wilderness and bushcraft professionals or semi-pros. And, in exchange, they dump their heart and soul into the cameras and give us the content that we need to make a compelling show.”
(Note: There are some spoilers for Season 7.)
Have you been on-site, at base camp, for every season?
No, I was there for the first and second seasons. I hired showrunners, so we have people whose job it is to manage the field. Once the show was up and running, I didn't need to be in the field anymore. It just becomes an unnecessary expense. The more heads you add, it’s more helicopter trips. You don't want to be the guy who forces another round-trip chopper trip. On the ground for the first two seasons, but intimately involved in the casting, location searches, and production for every season since.
What’s the editing workflow like?
Alone can't be made like a normal show in post[-production], so we hire about 20 to 30 loggers who will log every minute of footage before we even bring any producers in to start assembling episodes. We'll have, on average, between 3 to 4,000 hours of footage per season. There’s so much, it takes two to three months to get through. But it then does make the rest of the post process much quicker, because you know what the tentpole moments are so you can build out your season arc.
How many people work on a season of Alone?
Not a huge team. [Witt later emailed to clarify that, on average, 32 producers and other crew members operate out of a base camp for the shooting every season, with another 28 post-production employees working from Leftfield’s New York office.]
Our biggest footprint in the field is our safety and survival response team. They go in shifts, because we work around the clock, but they need to be ready at any minute to go into the field. Outside of that, the people who help with laundry and food at camp are probably the next biggest group. It’s like having a small army.
And then when we're bringing participants out of the field, you have to reintroduce food into their diet, and make sure they talk to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, whoever's on call, just to help them in that re-immersion, because it's a lot. It's an exhausting experience physically and mentally, so we want to make sure that people have the aftercare that they need.
What did that aftercare look like for Season 1, and how has it evolved since then?
I don't think we realized in Season 1 that it was going to be more of a psychological show than a physical show. So we were very prepared to go through the whole reintroduction of food and diet and get people IVs and get them to local hospitals for a week or two if they needed just to get back on their feet.
But I don't think we were planning on, or even anticipated, people to have borderline PTSD. It's stressful and traumatic in a lot of ways being away from families, being scared, being alone. It brings things out of people that you can't predict, right? Some of the strongest folks going into the competition sometimes fall the hardest psychologically.
It was always part of our process to vet potential participants using a third-party medical and psychological evaluation. But we didn't have a psych on call 24/7 like we do now. And we didn't have paid aftercare. We pay—well, the network pays—for the participants to go to psychologists, whether they need it or not, after they leave the show. So they have a quota of visits that they can use, and we recommend that they do.
We also have a support system of alumni who've been on the show, so that even without us, if you were a participant on the show, you can talk to other past participants who can help you through the mental and physical things that they've gone through.
It's worth sharing too that the third-party medical and psych staff have the ability to make decisions that we can't overturn. Yes, it's a fine line. You don't want a medic pulling someone because they have a hangnail, so they do work with us. They understand we need to make a show. But if a psych or a medic tells me or my team that so-and-so isn't fit to continue, we listen to that and don't question it for one second, even if the participant says they want to stay in.
What were some of the driving forces behind developing [Alone’s aftercare program] this way?
Because we care. And this will put it in perspective.
We get thousands of applicants and whittle it down to about 40 people we like. Of those, we invite 20-24 to what we call a casting boot camp, and that's the assessment of your bushcraft skills, your personality, your ability to use tech and record your own experience, your psych review, and your medical assessment.
The first casting boot camp, none of the people who signed up knew there was a cash prize. We hadn't decided with History if there would be one, and how much. We just did a casting call that basically said, "Do you want to try this crazy thing," so we had people who just authentically showed up wanting to try this crazy thing. I remember speaking to them all at a hotel conference center, and I revealed to them that there was going to be a cash prize. I'd say 20 percent made angry faces because they were like "What is this now," 20 percent were excited, and the other 60 percent were somewhere in between.
I told them, "I don't care if this show rates, I don't care if it becomes the next big thing. We're not doing this for me, for Leftfield, for History. This show will work, and it will be successful if we're doing this for you.”
For them to focus on shooting and producing their own stuff while literally surviving is a big task. The only way they can trust to do that without a horrible thing happening, which could, is knowing that we're there, 15 minutes away, and if they press a button, we'll be there to save them. That's all that I cared about. And we carried that spirit of The show is about the contestants before it's about anything else, every step of the way.
What is the most common reason for a medical extraction, and what is the most common reason for a contestant tapping out?
The most common medical extraction is gastrointestinal distress, so severe, medically critical constipation—haven't pooped in weeks. When you dramatically change your diet from being a North American diet to eating twigs and mushrooms and nonstop roughage, you're bound to experience stuff. Or parasites from eating fish. Or game that, though cooked, didn't do enough to prevent you from getting worms.
I think the majority of our tapouts in general are psychological. People did not realize how difficult it would be to be away from their children, their partners. Also, something we've learned is that being alone forces you to face your own demons and/or skeletons that, when you're distracted by your day-to-day, hide better than when there's nothing else to do but think about them.
Do you ever feel bad about filming this stuff and watching people at these low moments, as compelling as it makes for television?
No, for two reasons. One, they have the choice whether to document it or not. Although we do oblige that they shoot X amount of hours a day, as part of the agreement of being on the show, we've also promised at every step of the way that if there's something you say in a moment of weakness or whatever that you do not want us to put on television, we will not put it on television. It doesn't do us any good to embarrass you, or reveal something to your friends or family or the general public that makes you look bad or embarrassed or weak, because that's not what this show is about.
This show is about us facilitating a dream, and that dream is wilderness survival. If from that comes these great guard-dropping emotive moments, awesome, that's a win. And in a lot of ways, it's cathartic for people. People have lost children for a variety of reasons and they've packed that away, and it just becomes waterfall after waterfall of emotional dumping. When they're there with the camera, it becomes like their therapist, like the volleyball in Cast Away. Not to take away from what they're doing. It's not trivial.
I find it interesting that, as you said, a lot of contestants come in looking to fulfill their dreams as survival experts, and some are quite confident in their ability to do so. But then, also as you said, the highest number of people who tap out do so because they miss their community, because they don’t want to be alone anymore. Do you think the show reveals anything about loneliness? Do you think it’s sending a message about the importance of not going through life alone?
I don't know if it sends a message about being alone versus not being alone is better or worse. I think what it does say is that, when you are alone, ironically, you can't hide from yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses, your fears.
You can't anticipate how it's going to be. There's people who go out there with such bravado, and within 12 hours they're quitting because they're pissing their pants over a noise they heard in the woods. These are people who have gone on solo wilderness excursions. They're not afraid of hunting and being out in the wild where there's bears. But when you're there and no one else can come rescue you, and you're not a phone call away, it's impactful, and it makes a difference.
Do you ever worry that you'll get there too late before something happens?
Our response team is so good, and we provide [participants] with an emergency triage kit. So the only things that would really worry me are a heart thing, or if someone were to fall and hit their head, and be unresponsive and bleeding.
But we have processes in place where every morning and evening, everyone has to check in via the sat phone. We check in and say, “You good?” and if they don't check in, we send a team to find them right away. They might be like, We forgot, or My phone was in the thing and I was hooking a fish. And we're like, “OK, cool, don't forget to check in because otherwise we're wasting gas coming to check.”
You could say, what about drowning? Any time someone's going to venture into the water—that doesn’t mean fishing, but if someone’s going to, say, make a canoe—they have to tell us first so we can drive a boat within like five minutes of them. That way if there's an emergency, we can go save them without impacting their aloneness.
We always get the question: Why don't we go to this crazy desert location or South America? The reason is because of venomous spiders and snakes, and that would concern me. If you got bit by a venomous snake, it doesn't matter if we're 15 minutes away. You could be dead in five minutes. That's why we're almost always in Canada, where, yes, bears and wolves and that sort of thing are a legitimate threat. But the likelihood—knock on wood—of a bear mauling a participant is fairly minimal, and all they have to do is press a red button and we come get them.
We do enough to give me peace of mind that we're doing as good as the Coast Guard. And we can call in the Coast Guard if we have to.
Along those lines, what work goes into building relationships for access to the places where you shoot?
Every season, we have to meet and earn the trust and respect of the Native American tribes, the Indigenous Canadian tribes. [Note: Season 11 was shot on the traditional land of the Gwich'in people.] That requires us going well in advance and meeting with them and learning about their land and traditions. Before every season starts, our crew and participants are blessed via a ritual that the native community does for us, and we exchange gifts, as is customary. We make sure that they trust that we're not going to abuse the quantity of wildlife that we harvest for the show.
We're also dealing with Crown land in Canada, and any local government, you have to work with them to make sure you're pulling all of the hunting and fishing permits and game permits that every individual needs, even though they're on television. They still need it as if they were a real hunter going out in the wild. And there are quotas. There have been instances in seasons where we hit our quota of rabbits and we have to tell people to stop killing rabbits, because we've come to our limit.
One of my favorite recurring shots is the frame-by-frame dismantling of the shelters after someone leaves, where the structures just fade back into the landscape. [Often, this is only shown for the final two or three contestants.] What is that process like?
We always tell the Indigenous tribes that we'll leave your land as we found it. They know we're going to cut down trees for firewood and shelter, and we usually have to keep the trees that we cut down to a certain circumference and quantity within reason. But we want to make sure we’ve honored that promise.
So our [director of photography] crews and survival experts go in and literally, in reverse order, dismantle every single shelter, and place that stuff thoughtfully throughout the wilderness to make it look like it was naturally there. You're not going to look off 30 feet and see a hump of debris. They actually go put logs under certain parts of trees and by the beaches. It's very thoughtful.
A few rapid-fire ones to end. Do you have a favorite shelter someone’s made?
Gosh. I mean, Roland's stone house … I don't know if that's exactly what he called it.
“Rock House.” [Built into an embankment and insulated by enormous boulders, the shelter helped Roland Welker last 100 days in the Arctic to win Season 7.]
Rock House, yes. That one I loved, just because it was so simple but ballsy and badass, which is kind of Roland. Roland is, and I say this with respect and love, by far the most feral contestant we've ever had. You meet Roland in a hotel lobby, and you feel like you're talking to a different species of human. Again, I say that in an evolved way, not in a devolved way. He is more animal than man in so many ways, so his shelter just really speaks to me because it's so primitive.
I’ve read that people will sometimes try to smuggle in extra gear or supplies. What’s the most brazen attempt?
I don't know if this is the most brazen, but it's the most creative. Somebody made new buttons for their clothing out of salt, so that they could have salt in their diet, so they literally molded hard salt buttons, sewed them into their clothing, and we were none the wiser.
So, what, you’re just licking your buttons off-camera?
I think you'd just cut them off. That was super creative. People will sew things into the very fine parts of their tarps. Our bushcraft team, they're like CSI investigators at this point—they deconstruct everything. But the buttons always stand out to me as both brilliant and obnoxious that someone tried it.
Finally, what would you say would be the most surprised you've ever been at a moment on the show, the most “Holy shit, I can't believe that happened” situation?
I don’t want to reference Roland twice, but I will. The fact that he shanked to death a musk ox … while filming it on a GoPro—it doesn't matter how many times I watch that moment, I always say, “Holy fucking shit, this is the most amazing, crazy show that's ever been made.”
