Reality Show Contestants Left In Wilderness, Not Told Show Is Canceled

We need a movie about this, and we need it now.

By Lauren Piester Mar 28, 2017 2:53 AMTags

If this isn't the plot of a movie or a limited series we're about to get obsessed with, someone needs to fix that immediately.

Eden was a reality show on Channel 4 in the UK that was supposed to chronicle a group of 23 strangers attempting to build a society from scratch in the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, accompanied by a small camera crew. 

The show aired four episodes last summer, but was then shelved after ratings dropped to less than a million viewers. That's typical (remember Utopia??). What's not typical is that the contestants were not told that the show was canceled, and were left in the wild to continue the experiment. 

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Last week, the 10 contestants who hadn't quit the show emerged from the 600 acre estate where it was filmed to discover what had happened in the last year, including Brexit, Donald Trump becoming president, and the cancellation of their show. 

Being canceled wasn't even Eden's only issue. By September 2016, a third of the contestants had decided to leave, saying they were too hungry, or had been bullied by other contestants, or just that the show was not what they thought it was going to be. (For instance, at one point, some of the men were forming a plan called "Operation C--t" to get the women off the show.) 

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Channel 4 has reportedly promised that the rest of the experiment will still air, just in a less timely fashion than it originally began airing. 

"The appeal of Eden is that it was a real experiment, and when filming began we had no idea what the results would be and how those taking part would react to being isolated for months in a remote part of the British Isles," the channel said in a statement obtained by Variety. "That's why we did it, and the story of their time, including the highs and the lows, will be shown later this year."

It's obvious that Eden wasn't quite what anyone thought it was going to be, but that makes for an even better fictionalized limited series that we are now impatiently waiting for. It's like Lost, but on purpose! And with worse men!