Discovery's "Dude, You're Screwed" - NYTimes.com A former Navy SEAL, Jake Zweig got his start on reality TV as a small-minded loudmouth on the third season of "Top Shot," the underappreciated marksmanship competition show on the History Channel. He was a talented shooter, but also petty and sulky and disruptive; his elimination came as a relief. So it was gratifying a couple of weeks ago to see him stranded atop a glacier in Iceland, with only a handful of tools at his disposal - and a large pink teddy bear. This was the series premiere of Discovery's "Dude, You're Screwed," a program that transforms survival into sport. Mr. Zweig was the first guinea pig on this show, in which a participant is dropped into a remote, unforgiving locale and has 100 hours to find civilization. This show, which airs on Sundays, is the energy-burst counterpart to another Discovery show, the slow-burning "Naked and Afraid," which places a pair of survival experts, one male and one female, in nature's cruelest locales for 21 days with no clothes on their backs in a test of ingenuity and will. Unlike offerings of an earlier time - from the long-running and highly stylized "Survivor" series to the meditative "Survivorman" to the semi-staged "Man vs. Wild" - this front edge of survival-oriented reality television is becoming more extreme, more theatrical - and more dangerous, slowly morphing into "The Hunger Games." People have already died for the sake of reality television. A contestant on "Koh-Lanta," the French version of "Survivor," died during shooting in March. In February, a helicopter carrying a cast member of a military-themed show on Discovery crashed, killing the contestant, the pilot and a crew member. And this doesn't account for the disturbing number of suicides of former reality-show contestants. These new shows push even further, emphasizing an extreme level of deprivation. Manu, a recent participant on "Naked and Afraid," who contracted dengue fever while in the Panamanian jungle, is shown bedridden and in pain in the concluding scene of her episode, warning those who consider coming on the show to be sure they're built for the task. During its premiere season this year, "Naked and Afraid," thanks in part to its extended time frame, had a number of injuries, which in some cases led players to exit the game early. And during location scouting in Costa Rica before the first season, a producer was bitten by a venomous snake and almost lost his foot. These shows aren't designed to sate some innate American blood thirst - one hopes - but they do demonstrate that what passed for frisson just a few years ago no longer qualifies. Survivors must push themselves harder to generate the same thrill level and the line between a test of skill and outright danger is getting blurred. In the movies, blood lust as entertainment is old hat, from "The Hunger Games" to "Surviving the Game" to "The Running Man," which is set in the not too distant future. These are fantasy scenarios, galling and unsettling, but reality TV is beginning to bridge the gap between documentary and dystopian nightmare. It isn't going full snuff, but the imminent threat of harm is becoming a little too commonplace for comfort. "Dude, You're Screwed" centers on five men, most with advanced military training, who take turns running gantlets designed for them by the others. Episodes open with essentially a staged rendition - the mark is kidnapped, hooded and bound at the wrists, then spirited off to who knows where. Unhooded, he's left to fend for himself with just a handful of tools provided by the team. As for suspension of disbelief, wouldn't the participants know their destination when they've presumably gone through passport control? While the contestant in the game - all the men refer to it as "the game," though there's no prize - makes his way through various struggles, the other four men observe him remotely, and sometimes say grim things like "Moisture kills out here." But more often, their mood is light. It's like the home run contest before the All-Star Game, an essentially meaningless display of skills where titans watch one another show off. But the casual mood also serves to take the edge off the very real struggle of the man in the wild. One of the rare gritted-teeth-all-around moments comes in this Sunday's episode when Matt, a primitive-skills expert, hurts his knee in the Costa Rican wild and spends much of the second half of his challenge stumbling, as the other men observe him and wince. "Naked and Afraid" is about survivalism, too, but also about how to navigate long-term relationships that change over time. In this it's like Discovery's "Dual Survival," one of the great relationship shows of the last few years, in which a hard-nosed military man and a Zen barefoot outdoorsman learn to trust each other in the wild. The participants on this show are more varied - survival experts and military men but also well-meaning back-to-the-landers with dubious skills. Over the three-week run they wither, amateur and pro alike. Rare is the participant still peppy at the end of the adventure - getting stung on the penis by jellyfish will derail even the hardiest. Twenty-one days is enough time to build trust and decimate it several times over, and long enough for someone to drop their pretensions altogether. So while "Dude, You're Screwed" is about a person at war with himself, "Naked and Afraid" is about people at war with each other. The elements may get you down, but hell is other people.