It’s one of the most popular reality franchises on TVNZ+, so why are Alone fans so unhappy? Alex Casey investigates.
Talk to any fan of the survivalist reality series Alone and they will soon start to babble excitedly like contestant Jordan Jonas after he successfully shot a moose in season six. Dropping 10 survival experts into a remote wilderness without any food, company or camera crew in sight, the show challenges participants to outlast each other to win $500,000. The longest time on Alone? Ronald Welker, who managed 100 consecutive days in the sub-Arctic. The shortest? The fella who tapped out just six hours in after finding fresh bear poo (relatable).
Even the soft-handed folks at The Spinoff can’t get enough. In 2023, founder Duncan Greive called Alone one of his favourite television discoveries of the year. “In a world entirely mediated by technology, I was transfixed watching people create a life outside it,” he said. The Spinoff writer Tara Ward agreed that it was “hugely compelling telly” in her review. “The simplicity of the format is a refreshing change in a TV landscape filled with contrived survival shows. There’s no villains here, only a bunch of lonely, damp heroes hoping to make it through the night.”
Books editor Claire Mabey further explained the show’s “honest” appeal to me. “I think it has something to do with the intense satisfaction that comes when a contestant manages to achieve something as small as catching a fish – like all of life is stripped right down to simply getting food into the body,” she said. “What happens to people when they’re down to their barest selves and with only a camera to talk to – it’s so gripping!”
With the series in TVNZ+’s top 20 most-streamed shows every week, it’s not just The Spinoff who are gripped. Film producer and director Ant Timpson is perhaps the most fervent Alone fan in Aotearoa. “Alone just stands on another pinnacle above all those faux extreme reality shows that have camera crews literally all around them. Survivor, Naked and Afraid, Bear Grylls – they’re all just big phonies, whereas Alone is the genuine article,” he said. “It’s just incredible how people step up, especially when temperatures drop down to minus 30 and shit gets very real.”
But it was while he was recently partaking in his favourite hobby – scouring Reddit Alone threads – that Timpson unearthed a gnarlier mystery than how to kill a musk ox with one’s bare hands. When someone in the United States made mention of a scene in the current season where a participant named Will performed a powerful puppet show with dead rabbits, he realised he was being left out of the loop down here in Aotearoa. “I had no idea what they were on about,” he lamented. “Where are these Alone scenes that these people are loving?”
Timpson continued down this dead-rabbit hole, and soon realised that episodes of the current Alone season are often much longer in the United States than here in Aotearoa. “The initial two episodes are the same length, but then we start losing 20-odd minutes per episode,” he said. Could it be due to our weird frame rate conversion shaving off a few minutes here and there? “You’re talking to a dinosaur who grew up with PAL and NTSC. This is not frame rates. This is a slaughter. It’s a maniac with a pair of digital scissors. It’s Edward Scissorhands on crack.”
Posting about the duration discrepancy on Instagram, Timpson received an outpouring of outrage and confusion from the local Alone community. “This fight is for the Alone purists, and by God, you have no idea how many there are. We are legion… I’m talking about commissioners. I’m talking about producers. I’m talking about directors. I’m talking about writers. I’m talking about actors, all in absolute stunned shock at what’s happened here,” he said. “It’s a Godfather move. It’s like Fredo – you’re being killed by the family that you trusted.”
Asked about Alone fans feeling short-changed in Aotearoa, a spokesperson for TVNZ told The Spinoff that The History Channel, who makes the show in the United States, creates two versions of Alone for international broadcasters to fit a standard commercial‑hour episode (around 40 minutes) and an extended version (around 60 minutes). “In New Zealand, we licence the commercial‑hour cut, which is the format that best fits our scheduling and is consistent with how we’ve aired the series across our platforms,” they explained.
Although the duration is much shorter than in the US, TVNZ added that the editing should have no impact on the central narratives of the show. “This version is crafted to be the punchiest and most streamlined edit, so Kiwi fans aren’t missing any of the core story or competition.”
While the missing Alone minutes are enough for Timpson to consider turning to a life of VPN-based crime – “how else am I going to see Will do his puppet show with dead rabbits? I need to see that” – he hopes to see a “fair and equitable” transaction between TVNZ+ and devoted Alone fans in future. “We are very supportive of this show. We spend valuable minutes of our lives that should be with loved ones, and instead we devote it to watching Alone and your ads. The reciprocal thing to do would be to at least show us the whole goddamn show.”
In the meantime, he’s more than happy to keep raising awareness about what he considers the greatest television show ever made. “The very best thing is putting new people onto it who’ve never seen it, and just watching them fall in love with it,” he says. Well, a portion of it at least.
Click here to watch our slightly shorter season of Alone on TVNZ+
