If you saw any people beginning their week wandering around looking around as if they had lost something, it’s very possible that these poor victims are trying to find the two hours they lost by watching Discovery Channel’s Eaten Alive on Sunday night.
When the concept (televised stunt) was announced a month ago, we were on board. A man volunteering to be devoured by a massive snake? Visions of Jon Voight being swallowed and regurgitated in Anaconda flooded our minds and made us giddy. Never mind that reality surely couldn’t match up to CGI fantasy and campiness. Let us indulge our imaginations! What was this going to look like when wildlife specialist Paul Rosolie allowed himself to be… eaten alive?
If you subjected yourself to this two-hour special Sunday night, you know that it looked like just about nothing. One hour and 45 minutes of the show was devoted to trying to catch the giant snake that would be used in this stunt. Let’s repeat that, just to drill the stupidity in for all of us who kept watching. (Full disclosure: I only tuned in for the second hour of the show, after being reminded that Eaten Alive was on.) Almost the entire program had nothing to do with the promised premise of a snake eating a man.
In what should have been viewed as a setup for the eventual letdown, Rosolie and his team of adventurers didn’t even catch the truly large beast they wanted. Instead of nabbing the 27-inch, 300-pound anaconda which Rosolie claims to have seen years ago — painting this as his white whale — these wildlife gloryhounds had to settle for a 20-inch, 25-pounder that probably wasn’t up to the task of swallowing Rosolie and his snake-proof suit. The poor guy. (I’m talking about the snake, not Rosolie.)
Speaking of that snake suit, that provided some interest during those final 15 minutes. Quite a bit of thought actually went into this get-up. It was actually something of an engineering marvel that all by Tony Stark might be impressed with.
The suit began with a base layer to keep the body warm, covered by a protective layer meant to guard against the acids Rosolie could encounter in the snake’s stomach. He also wore a chainmail layer intended to shield him from razor-sharp teeth. The suit was finished with armor intended to withstand the crushing, constricting grip of the snake’s coiled body. And of course, Rosolie’s head was protected by a mask outfitted with a breathing appartus and a helmet to prevent him from getting bitten and crushed.
Adding some suspense to the entire endeavor, Rosolie decided the armor on the forearms and legs restricted his movement, preventing him from being able to wrap his arms around the snake’s neck or squatting down to get low with the beast. The doctor on hand warned him that losing that armor probably wasn’t a good idea. But she was talking to Paul Rosolie, man! He’s a naturalist who gets down and wrestles snakes with the intention of being eaten for the benefit of television audiences.
Eventually, the show had to get to what it promised: Rosolie suiting up and serving himself as a pig blood-doused meal to a giant snake. Surely, there would be a payoff for sitting through one hour and 45 minutes of set-up. (To be fair, there were some thrills in that part of the show, as Rosolie’s team jumped into murky waters to catch the snake. Some of these operations were attempted at night, when all kinds of beasts — including crocodiles — were lurking in those jungle waters.)
And here’s where everyone involved — everyone watching, that is — underestimated just how slow and deliberate this exercise would be.
Anyone expecting Rosolie to face off against a darting, slithering, attacking snake was likely let down by a man laying down and letting the anaconda wrap itself around him. But that’s how they do it in the wild, right? The anaconda doesn’t rise up like a cobra, then strike. It wraps up its pray, slowly constricts to crush the life out of its victim, presumably to crush the meal down to a more palatable size and then goes about eating. This isn’t something that makes for exciting television.
Filmmakers and editors tried to add some juice to footage of the anaconda basically giving Rosolie an increasingly tighter hug, but there was only so much that could be done. Cameramen were keeping their distance, surely to prevent the snake from being distracted, but also likely to avoid being attacked as well. Along with repeated footage of the snake’s scaly body coiling around its prey, we mostly had Rosolie’s voice narrating what was happening.
Additionally, cameras showed Rosolie’s crew watching what was happening and becoming more fearful as the wildlife expert was rendered helpless. A doctor was monitoring vital signs, tracked by leads in the suit, getting more concerned about Rosolie’s heart rate. Sitting next to him was Rosolie’s wife, who was both curious — surely because she knew what this meant to her husband — and scared about what might happen.
Personally, I think the show could have added even more suspense if Rosolie’s wife took that moment to tell him that she wanted a divorce. Paul, I’d been thinking about it for months now, but seeing you subject yourself to this entire thing kind of confirmed it for me. We can talk more about it after you get untangled with that snake. Oh, that is, if you survive after it tries to eat you. Alas, she appeared to be standing by her man. Or standing off to the side of her man, as was the case here.
The suspense ramped up as Rosolie described feeling the snake squeeze tighter and losing sensation in his limbs. Moving to get better leverage was no longer an option. Discovery did get something close to its money shot when the snake decided to try eating Rosolie, going for a bite of the head. A camera mounted in the helmet got a view right down the snake’s throat as it opened its jaw. Unfortunately, this could only go so far because the suit’s helmet was just too big for the snake to get its mouth around. It was like the worst case of suckface ever.
Whether it was the futility of the entire endeavor — getting a snake that just wasn’t quite big enough — or Rosolie truly feeling endangered, he finally tapped out, fearing that his arm would snap from the constricting pressure of the snake’s body. Rosolie said he could feel the bone in his arm begin to flex, which is something that nobody should voluntarily have to experience. Of course, this entire exercise was voluntary. Upon giving the signal, the crew ran in to pull the snake off Rosolie, safely subdue it and put it back into the wilderness.
The snake surely felt unsatisfied, not only being deprived of getting to vanquish its foe, but missing out on a meal. (There’s no way Rosolie could have tasted good, right? He was covered by carbon fiber, kevlar, chainmail and neoprene. Maybe it would have been like eating a crab or crawfish, getting through that tough outer shell to get to the tasty meat inside. We’ll never know unless someone is dumb enough to try this again and interview the snake afterwards.) Also feeling extremely unfulfilled was the television audience.
To call a show Eaten Alive and not have anyone actually eaten alive is deceiving headline bait of the worst kind. Viewers had every reason to feel cheated, even if it’s probably good that they didn’t see Rosolie swallowed whole and then pulled out of the snake. Those are two hours people are just not getting back, unless Discovery Channel’s next stunt is to create a time machine that can vault viewers two hours into the past by watching one of its programs.
As embarrassed as Rosolie (who’s on Twitter, by the way), his team of enablers and Discovery Channel should be, calling him a “pussy” is probably excessively harsh. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t go anywhere near a snake a tenth of that anaconda’s size, let alone get down on the ground and let the snake wrap itself around me. (Yet I also wouldn’t claim that this entire stunt was meant to raise awareness of wildlife extinction. Does Rosolie think people will actually buy that? It’s laughable.)
And who knows what sorts of bugs and infection everyone involved risked by being in the jungle, especially jumping into those waters surely teeming with all sorts of bacteria and predatory microbes.
You know, Eaten Alive might have benefited from an Animal House-style summary that told us where these characters ended up years after the events of the movie took place. “Jim had a severe intestinal bug that required an eight-month stay in the hospital. He can no longer eat solid food.” “Dr. Whats-Her-Face was stripped of her medical license and spends her days playing Operation at a local coffee shop.” “Paul’s wife stayed in their marriage, but uses this to win every single argument the couple ever had.” I mean, did Discovery really think this thing through?
Viewers should definitely think it through next time Discovery offers this kind of staged event on its network. Fooled once, shame on them. Fooled twice, feed yourself to an anaconda.
UPDATE (6:30 p.m. ET): Here are the ratings for Eaten Alive.
Just in: Discovery’s “Eaten Alive” special draws 4.1 million viewers, pretty good for Discovery, but not huge “event” level ratings.
— Alex Weprin (@alexweprin) December 8, 2014
