Fun new realigame started on America’s The CW a few days ago, Capture. It’s the effectively the unofficial game of the film of the book The Hunger Games (which rather embarrassingly I haven’t actually watched yet).
It stars twelve teams of two (and fans of colours (especially green) are well served here, there’s a green, a lime AND teal team, probably the first and last time you’ll see the word ‘teal’ used on US television) and it’s hosted by a man who appears to be genuinely called Luke Tipple who is also an Australian marine biologist, it says here.
Effectively it’s Bother’s Bar favourite Run for Money done as a reality show. The teams play in the Hunting Grounds, a 4,000 acre bit of land with trees, hills, bears and the like, however the GREATEST THREAT is, as is so often the case in these things, your fellow man. One team is randomly chosen to be the Hunters who are each given a Talon – like a magnetic disk. The other teams are the prey, and must run away because if the Hunters manage to place a Talon on one of their vests then they have been caught. Hunters get two days and four hours a day to capture two teams – failure to meet the quota means going up for elimination themselves, and if they don’t catch anyone being immediately eliminated. To help them, each team wears a GPS map, and whatsmore if a team of prey stay still for longer than three minutes, their location will pop up on the Hunter’s GPS.
Captured teams are taken to an open air prison where they must sleep braving the elements, but the other teams don’t have it well off either, the Village consists of metal frame bunk beds with no mattresses and some items in a box they can make a rudimentary tent with. Food is scarce, but they do have a fire, and we’re shown that temperatures at night are barely above freezing.
At elimination, the two teams on the chopping block (the two teams caught, or the Hunters if they didn’t meet their quota) stand on platforms, each with two bridges – one back into the game, one out of the compound. One by one and boringly the other teams decide who they want to send home. Once one team has reached enough votes and in a fit of HIGH DRAMA the bridges collapse so one team can rejoin and the other go home. At the end of the series (and I’m intrigued to find out how they’re going to decide the winner) the winning team win $250k.
Nice concept, and nicely filmed, the biggest problem with episode one for me was lack of crunch points – the area of play is huge and it’s pretty unlikely teams will accidentally bump into each other whereas in something like Run For Money not only are there loads of players but the playing area is small enough that there will be an exciting chase every few minutes – I’m also really hoping they start to throw some twists into the game as well even if it’s just reducing the area of the hunt. Living with the spartan conditions is quite appealing, it’s going to be as much a test of endurance as anything else. There were also probably a few too many teams for their own good, certainly quite a few of them seemed to get passed over this first episode. And the voting element is boring.
It doesn’t smell like a hit to me – the tone is a bit ridiculous for a start – but I enjoyed watching and will continue to watch. Worth seeking out.
