The cult-hit survival series Alone Australia will premiere with a double episode on Wednesday 29 March at 7.30pm, and continue weekly from 7.30pm, exclusively on SBS and SBS On Demand.
The show sees 10 Australian survivalists dropped in the remote wilds of Western Tasmania, completely isolated from the world and each other, stripped of modern possessions, contact and comforts, to self-document their experience – the last one standing winning $250,000.
See Also: Alone Australia: Everything you need to know about the contestants
Challenged by the forces of nature, hunger, and loneliness, who will survive the longest?
Mediaweek spoke to SBS Head of Unscripted, Joseph Maxwell, about bringing Alone Australia to life.
See Also: “A huge level of risk”: The logistics of heading into the wild with Alone Australia
Alone already has very successful seasons overseas. Maxwell says that bringing the format down under was less a question of whether or not it should be done, but more about what Australia could offer the format.
“We started looking at the performance of Alone USA and Scandinavia, and watched it climb, and climb, and climb, and climb. The numbers are absolutely staggering, it’s the biggest ever factual series in SBS On Demand history. We realised there was an extraordinary appetite for the show and extraordinary engagement, the question we then had to ask was, why do an Australian version?
“What we felt really clearly, was that there’s an angle and input we could give that will make it feel uniquely and distinctly Australian.”
Ultimately in a show with so much risk to create, Maxwell says that it was absolutely worth it for the team in the end.
“The risk is like nothing else with this show, what’s extraordinary is that it has paid off. I think the answer to why it’s paid off is that there’s something beautiful in the simplicity of the format. It’s not about interventions, it’s not about rules, it’s just very raw and unfiltered. That’s where the strength of this shows lies, and that’s what actually intrinsically makes it work.”