Democratic, Republican senators stranded on deserted island in reality show
What do you get when you strand a Democrat and a Republican together on a deserted island?
No, it's not a perfunctory punch line - it's "Rival Survival," a one-episode series premiering Oct. 29 at 10 p.m. ET on the Discovery Channel.
Though bipartisanship - or more accurately, the dearth of it - has killed many a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill, Sens. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, and Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, will rely almost entirely on that principle of equilibrium to keep themselves alive in the show's "Survivor"-esque format. It was taped over six days on Eru, one of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
A press release from Discovery previews the episode's plot, which apparently involves two Washington suit-types stabbing at fish with a spearhead and attempting to start fires with glass: "Disconnected from the world on an uninhabited island surrounded by shark infested waters that mirror the seemingly treacherous terrain of the U.S. Congress, [the senators] must put their political differences aside and work together for six days and six nights to find common ground through compromise if they want to survive."
According to the Discovery Channel, Eru offers no source of fresh water and amounts to "an utterly unforgiving deserted destination where the reefs alone are fraught with dangers that include venomous stonefish, lionfish and scorpion fish." Flake, who's embarked on excursions to the region twice before, explained the show's development to the Washington Post.
"Our first thought was just to go and take a few Go-Pro cameras and film it and document it or hand it over to someone," Flake told the Post on Thursday. "Then we approached Discovery because they have a number of survivor shows and they said, 'well, we like the idea but how about you let us come film it?'"
In a joint statement, the two suggested that with a slim-margin majority likely to lead the Senate come midterms, they wanted to get the show out before November's elections to prove the two parties can collaborate.
"Both of us know just how frustrated people are with Washington right now," the statement read. "We can both attest that no one is more frustrated than those of us trying to get things done in this environment. We recognize how difficult it can be to cut through the partisanship. So we decided to do something completely out of the ordinary and frankly a little extreme to show the world and our colleagues that even if you have serious differences, if you want to survive you have to work together."
