Kim preparing to cook and eat a turtle on “Naked and Afraid.” (Discovery Channel)
Kim suffering through food poisoning on “Naked and Afraid” after eating a turtle. What producers didn’t show viewers was the food and IVs they gave the ailing contestant. (Discovery Channel)
Discovery Channel’s new hit series “Naked and Afraid” claims to be different from its reality TV brethren because it literally strips the clothes off contestants’ backs and forces them into “pure” survival mode.
But behind the scenes of last Sunday’s premiere episode producers gave a sick female contestant food and IVs without telling the audience while her male partner broke three toes with viewers only learning that he had hurt his foot, according to Mail Online.
In each episode of “Naked and Afraid” a pair of total strangers are “stranded” in an extreme environment with no food, water, or clothes and must survive for 21 days.
On the 15th day of 22-year-old Kim Shelton’s time in the Costa Rican, jungle she caught a turtle and then cooked and ate the creature.
Shortly after saying that the meat “makes me feel so good,” Shelton began to feel sick, have severe stomach cramps and started violently vomiting.
“I don’t think I can throw up any more, I don’t think I have anything left,” Shelton said to the camera during her ordeal.
For the next three days Shelton was shown sleeping because the illness made her so weak and then on the fourth day she started miraculously feeling better.
What viewers did not see, however, was the bread, rice and baby food producers gave Shelton while she was sick, alleges a source close to the show. Shelton was also hooked up to two IVs in order to get rehydrated.
While it is common for reality shows to fake things on screen, the entire premise of “Naked and Afraid” is that “there is no manipulation, no element of scripted reality,” executive producer Denis Contis told the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s the ultimate survival show,” continued Contis. “[Contestants] were placed in this location, where and how they survived and if they traveled at all, that was up to them.”
“We always developed it with our filter being ”how do we protect and it make it a pure survival experience?”’ Contis told Salon.
The pure nature of the show was established in the very beginning of the premiere when the audience was told that one of the show’s producers had nearly died after he was bitten by an extremely venomous fer-de-lance snake.
To get the venom out and save the man’s life doctors were forced to cut open and remove a 5-inch-wide, foot-long chunk of the man’s flesh.
While audiences became aware of this gruesome reality (WARNING: click here to see the gross picture Bear Grylls tweeted of the injury), Shelton’s partner in Costa Rica, 40-year-old Shane Lewis broke three toes on his fourth day in the jungle but the audience was only told that had hurt his foot.
“When I agreed to do the show I said to the producers that if you’re going to do a real, raw show I will do it,” Lewis told Mail Online.
“They said they wanted to show the reality and how difficult it was, but they went for the ratings.”
“They gave it the Hollywood treatment.”
“Naked and Afraid” drew 4.16 million viewers to its Sunday premiere making it the highest rated series premiere in 2013, according to TV By The Numbers.
The next episode airs this Sunday, June 30th at 10 pm when two survivalists are dropped into the brutally hot Serengeti plains of Tanzania.
You can watch the first episode of the show here.