Man vs. Wild

Man vs. Wild is a Discovery Channel show in which famed survivalist Bear Grylls (actually a nickname), runs the audience through techniques and strategies to keep yourself alive when lost and lonely in the wilderness. The show run from 2006 to 2011.

He visits many many different areas to get the point across, including Zambia, Alaska, the Amazon, the Florida Everglades, and so on and so forth. The point, of course, is that eating bugs is good.

Bear Grylls is perhaps most famous for his strange habit of eating any of the local wildlife small enough (and some that even aren't) to fit in his mouth. After eating a Zambian grub, he proudly proclaimed that it was "like having your friends put their bogeys together and slip it into a sausage. And then put it into your mouth." Brave man, Bear Grylls.

The series took some flak for orchestrating several of the "natural" or "random" happenings, and for implying that the main character roughs it for the duration of the show, while he has on occasion stayed in a hotel. Some of the more Egregious offenses include Bear taming "wild" horses (actually trained horses brought in for the show) and having a crew member in a bear costume "attack" his campsite. The show has since opened each episode with a disclaimer to explain that not everything shown actually happened as depicted. Furthermore, starting around mid-Season 4, Bear & crew have pretty much given up on hiding scripted events and signs of civilization.

The series is also compared to Survivorman and both were once considered Dueling Shows... which is odd because they were both on Discovery Channel, and new episodes of one were usually only shown during the off-season of the other.

Starting around Season 4, the producers took a looser interpretation to "wilderness survival" and stopped masking or editing out train tracks, villages, landmarks, and other evidence of human civilization. There's even a Season 5 episode filmed in an abandoned city of Eastern Europe. Meet Bear Grylls: World Adventurer!

Bear also has a new show Worst Case Scenario, which is basically the same show but done with scripted events and special effects in an urban environment.

Tropes used in Man vs. Wild include:

• The Amazon - and other isolated locales.
• Awesome but Impractical: Some of Bear's advice, and his stunts.
• Badass - Bear eats weird stuff in every episode, has climbed down a waterfall using a vine, can build anything ranging from traps to a hut designed to help him save water like if he was Angus MacGyver, climbs like the fucking Spiderman, has gotten out of quicksand and other similar stuff several times and every once in a while he decides to do some push-ups like a man instead of reserving the energy for something else. And his past is pretty amazing too.
  • In case you're wondering about that past, Bear Grylls is a former SAS Reserve trooper, who not only passed Selection with flying colors, but apparently did extremely well in the survival training course (he can't talk about it too much, since Selection is a very secretive process).
• The Cast Showoff: Despite complaints about the fictionalized nature of their situation, Bear shows competence in his activities and does his all own stunts, including skydiving from a helicopter.
• Celebrity Star - An episode that broadcast in between Seasons 3 and 4 featured Will Ferrell accompanying Bear through mountains of Sweden. And he was surprisingly competent.
  • Jake Gyllenhaal will appear on an episode, as well.

• Dueling Shows - as mentioned, with Survivorman.
• Estrogen Brigade Bait - Bear himself, what with his frequent Shirtless Scenes and all.
  • Pantsless scenes too.
• Follow the Leader - Count the number of shows with an "X Vs Y" naming motif, since Man Vs. Wild debuted. The show itself is considered by some to be this to Survivorman.
• Gosh Hornet - Bear has some trouble getting honey from a bee's nest in season 1.
• Luckily, My Powers Will Protect Me - Bear regularly employs a real-life version of this trope; he pauses at some point in the episode just to explain to the viewers how particularly dangerous a certain course of action would be, often with a story about someone who was killed trying that exact same thing. Then he does precisely that, followed by his crew. To date, he is not dead.
  • This was parodied relentlessly and to great effect in the episode "Survivor Man" from The Office.
• Once an Episode - ...Bear jumps out of a plane, climbs up or slides down something, and eats something digusting.
• Reality Is Unrealistic - Evidently, when he's not desperately trying to survive in the godforsaken regions of the planet, Bear is a vegetarian.
  • It could just be a demonstration of survival mentality--if you're stuck in a desert, you'd have to make a really fast choice whether to eat anything (including meat) to keep yourself alive, or to die by limiting yourself to the diet that's only feasible under normal, non-life-threatening circumstances. He gets a lot of flack for not being quite realistic, but it's not like he brings food every time he's dropped in the middle of nowhere.
  • Of course, ever since the show was revealed to be largely staged (the "wild" locations are often just off the road, and the crew does help him and share their supplies, so he's in no real danger), one realizes that he's just breaking his ethics to make better TV.
    • Which assumes that he's a vegetarian for ethical reasons, and there is no indication he's so ridiculous.
• Retool: The show changed premise from survival to adventuring beginning in Season 5.
• Shirtless Scene - on a fairly frequent basis (perhaps not quite once an episode, but close). Pantsless almost as often.
• Versus Title