How Not to do Trash TV: Snowflake Mountain
After a long day of absorbing complex linguistic theory, the perennial ‘academese’, and dense, unadulterated historical records, sometimes all you need is some grade A garbage reality TV to take the edge off the day’s studies. I got more than I wished and bargained for. Snowflake Mountain (available on Netflix) struck me as too contrived and trite to even enjoy as a piece of pacifying, evening nonsense. The intentionally provocative show revolves around the typical reality format of fish-out-water challenges in the great outdoors, but with the eponymous ‘snowflakes’ being a band of young, privileged, and pampered socialites, all vying for a cash prize of $50,000. Two ex-military bush crafters act as the headshaking hosts, who drag the reluctant contestants (always referred to as snowflakes) through a series of supposedly character-building challenges in the ‘wilds’ of the Lake District, in an aim to change their self-indulgent ways.
Ignoring the not-so-subtle ‘kids these days’ premise of the entire show, the challenges and arrangements for the contestants are more wacky gameshow tasks than wilderness survival lessons. With inexplicable tasks, such as punching through plywood and collecting suspended parcels of foodstuffs, the ten would-be influencers seem more participants in an inconvenient team-building exercise, rather than rugged survivalists in training. Lodging in modest lakeside shacks and having access to the adequate amenities, the show seems to revel in its ill-executed premise, despite really only teaching a group of indisposed Zoomers how to endure mildly cruel and unusual punishment. Eventually, driven by the formulaic narrative, the contestants learn some ‘blooming respect’, and the all-needed life lessons youngsters apparently gain from chopping firewood, not arguing, and doing basic cleaning.
It’s hard to work out what’s more cynical: the loathsome gaggle of barefaced self-publicists, who all clearly understand the well-trodden trail of reality TV, or the producers of such output, who know what a proportion the frothing masses want to rail against. Both parties deliver the rage-bait with a theatricality that invites you to snark and scoff at your TV set, but makes you too aware of the hacky script to care. The talking heads and campfire clashes are sharply edited for maximum pearl-clutching, but the whole affair ends up feeling played-out and performed with minimal effort by all involved; the contestants dutifully deliver the insufferable preening, and the producers and hosts slap it together and expect you seethe against it. I don’t object to a bit schadenfreude viewing, but if you are looking to despair at the ‘yoof of today’, or reality TV in general, Snowflake Mountain falls short of the modern-day pillories audiences expect and deserve today.
