Take One Critic, Add Mud, Mix When TNT announced that it would be rolling out its first attempt at reality television, a competition show called "The Great Escape," starting Sunday, it seemed as if it might be an opportunity to explore two long-standing questions I've had about the genre: Are these competitions real, and, more important, could I do this stuff? My editor felt the same way, especially about Question 2, since she's a bit of an "Amazing Race" addict. So the two of us asked TNT and the creators of the show, Elise Doganieri and Bertram van Munster (who are also behind "The Amazing Race"), if we might come to a shooting location for "The Great Escape" and try out the course. That's how we found ourselves in the swamp west of New Orleans earlier this week locked in a hermit's shack wearing chain-gang-style leg irons. In "The Great Escape," three teams of two race to see which can be the first to escape from a particular set of circumstances, solving puzzles and overcoming physical challenges to do so. Episodes have been filmed on Alcatraz, in a missile silo, on an aircraft carrier and so on. The first team to escape wins $100,000. We got to try about half of the course that was being used to film the series finale, though we weren't racing against other teams and were not, alas, going to win any money. Our story, which featured some incredibly bad slingshot marksmanship and a near-death experience involving quicksand-like mud, appears here, along with some pretty embarrassing photographs.