Upsetting Day: Celebrity Bear Hunt🌭 (Patreon)

I found out there’s a UK reality TV show called Celebrity Bear Hunt, and I figured whichever way this show goes, it’s going to rule. Of course, I’m hoping for celebrities being hunted by bears, but if it’s celebrities attempting to hunt bears with terrible consequences, that would also rule. It turns out the celebrities are being hunted by famous outdoorsman Bear Grylls, and he is way too psyched about that. Look at this poster. Have you ever seen a man more ready to hunt people?

Bear Grylls is having way too much fun on this show. He’s enjoying himself so much that while he should probably be the host of the show, they hired a beautiful blonde woman in a white linen outfit to come and warn the celebrities about how Bear will be hunting them today, because Bear is the antagonist of the show. I’ll say it. He has the vibe of someone who’s hunted man before.

I used to assume that Bear Grylls was some sort of West Virginia mountain man, but he’s the son of a conservative British politician. He grew up sailing with his father at the Royal Yacht Club. He gained fame by writing books about how cool he is and the radical adventures he's had with his Daddy’s money. His work is usually titled something like: Bear Grylls Fucks: The Story Of a Remarkable Man Written by a Remarkable Man, Oh my God It's The Same Remarkable Man, Me, Bear Grylls.

Normally, I wouldn’t be down to watch a rich guy hunt people. I swear I always say no when I get invited to those parties, even when Tom Cruise is going to be there. However, he is hunting celebrities. Imagine if we had this in America, and we could vote for who Bear hunts. Adam Corolla, anyone from the cast of Secret Lives Of Mormon Wives, Corey Feldman, the possibilities are endless.

My favorite quote from a celebrity about the experience of being on the show is, “It’s like being in the underworld, and the devil is chasing you.” They really wanted people of all ages on the show, but they also wanted it to be very physically demanding, which means they immediately broke two old men. One tripped and tore his meniscus in the first challenge, and they let him sit in the main house, not doing challenges and enjoying Costa Rica for three full episodes, probably so he wouldn’t sue them. The other got tangled in some ropes and had a panic attack.

The show is set up in two rounds. During round one, the celebrities compete for the sweet relief of not being hunted by Bear Grylls. Most of the challenges involve planks over water at various heights, and they always say the water beneath them is either shark- or crocodile-infested. Then they show stock footage of a single crocodile that’s definitely a professional actor. That crocodile has a SAG card and voted for Emilia Perez, I just know it.

If the celebrities do poorly in the challenge, they must enter “The Bear Pit,” a cordoned-off section of forest they can only exit in specific areas. They can dig under a fence, scale a small section of cliff, crawl through a tunnel, etc. Later in the game, they add tools that the celebrities must gather to help them exit. The bear pit is booby trapped; sometimes the tools are inside a timed trap. Sometimes they’ll step on some leaves and, uh oh, it’s a big Looney Tunes net. Sometimes it’s just a thing that makes a loud sound, so Bear knows their location. Most of the time, the celebrities get caught. At most one celebrity manages to escape per episode. Say what you will about Bear Grylls (he sucks), but the man is really good at extreme tag.

He doesn’t have to tackle the celebrities to the ground and straddle them, but he does, just for a little extra humiliation. There’s also no need to tie them up. It’s a reality TV show; they’re not going to run away. They’re being paid handsomely to let Bear Grylls tackle them.

I can pretty confidently say that the celebrities all hate Bear Grylls because of his constantly injuring them, and also being weird. He makes them eat piss food and demonstrates the piss food by taking out his dick and pissing into the bag in front of them. It’s supposedly some sort of rations that require you to get a packet wet which creates a chemical reaction that heats it and then heats the food. They could use water from their water bottles but he tells them, “not to waste it” and since he is both their judge and captor all of the celebrities eat the pee pee food without complaining.

Why does every reality TV show have to be a little bit The Stanford Prison Experiment? It’s now illegal to put on different masks and scare babies, but if we called it Extreme Baby Survival and put it on NBC, it would get 12 seasons. They call the show “an experiment” a few times, but they also treat it as a self-improvement retreat, saying they’re there to prove something to themselves or to Bear. I don’t know why they would want to prove something to Bear, maybe so that he’ll leave them alone and stop pissing on their food and giving them concussions. Did I mention a newscaster got slammed into a rock wall and hit her head so hard she had to sit out the next challenge? Here’s a GIF of that.

The celebrities seem to think that getting your ass kicked by Bear Grylls is character-building and good for them. I was maybe on board with that until the piss food incident, when I realized that this is just woodsy bullying. There’s also a point where Bear Grylls is chasing down the actor who plays the guy who gives good haircuts on Ted Lasso, and loses in a foot race. Later, Bear says, “You got away from me by the river bed, actually, I let you get away. You shouldn’t have been running in that riverbed.” As if he let him escape for his own safety, that really made me decide the main purpose of this show is not to help anyone but Bear Grylls, and what he needs help with is figuring out how to make his picture even bigger on the cover of the sixth book that he wrote about how awesome he is.

The winner of Celebrity Bear Hunt, and the only man to avoid capture by Bear multiple times, was a rapper and chef named Big Zuu. People love shows where production throws a bunch of celebrities into harsh conditions because they genuinely bond over the fact that a madman is hunting them all. There’s a really sweet scene where Big Zuu and professional ballroom dancer Shirley Ballas bond over growing up with single moms in public housing and then going on to care for their mothers as adults. It’s touching, and the whole time they’re chatting, Bear Grylls is somewhere outside their hut in a tree just waiting to pounce.

Most of the celebrities left the show with only a head injury and footage of them eating piss food as their prize, but Big Zuu won, so he got a rope. He said, “I thought I was going to get a trophy but…I got a serious rope from Bear Grylls.” Because Big Zuu is a sweet guy, and he made it work, but like…what happened here? Did an intern lose the trophy? Rope cannot have been the first choice of prize. It’s not even an engraved rope. I think being hunted should at least earn you a world’s best prey mug.

It’s a shame this show wasn’t renewed. Maybe Bear was so horrible because he was prepping us for a season two where the celebrities get to hunt him. Maybe they tried to put together a season two, but celebrities watched season one and said I’m not giving up my dignity and health to win whatever garbage Bear Grylls has on the floor of his Jeep. Or, maybe they said Bear Grylls is already hunting me. If I go on this show, can you please make him stop?

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