[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Extracted series premiere.]
Fox has taken on an ambitious new reality TV format in Extracted. The Hunger Games meets Big Brother format revealed its cards in the series premiere on Monday, February 10, showing the 12 survivalists marooned in the Canadian wilderness while two of their loved ones got situated at “headquarters” 5 miles away. Survivor Season 39 alum Lauren-Ashley Beck visited the set during the last days of Season 1 filming to learn what it was like to play the game from the survivalists’ POV, and she tells TV Insider that it gave her the chance to redeem herself after her Survivor elimination in 2019.
Extracted strands 12 contestants with no real survivalist experience into the Canadian wilderness where they’ll be filmed 24/7 for weeks. That live feed is played in headquarters, where two of their friends or family are watching and taking on challenges to win resources to send into the campsites. There were no challenges on night one, which forced the families to just watch as their loved ones tried to build shelters with no tools and had no food. All they were given upon arrival were a backpack with a waterproof jacket and a thermal layer, and then they were on their own until the first challenge.
The survivalists must take care of themselves while their families fight for resources, and ultimately the fate of their games rests in the hands of those at HQ. At any moment, they can hit the ominous “Extract” button and withdraw their survivalist from the competition. With $250,000 at stake, there’s a lot on the line. It’s a psychological game of trust, grit, and resilience. And Beck got a firsthand look at the televised adventure.
Lauren-Ashley Beck and Megan Hine, Head of Extraction, on set of Extracted (FOX)
Beck competed in Survivor 39, “Island of the Idols,” and was eliminated in the fire-making challenge. She used her Extracted set visit as a chance for personal “redemption.”
“I unfortunately lost [Survivor] because I didn’t make fire, so that was something that I wanted to go out there and prove to myself that I could do and also to show my followers, I still got it,” Beck tells TV Insider. “I made a little fire [on Survivor], just not as big as my opponents’. I was able to make a fire when I went out there” on Extracted.
Beck, who’s hosting an Extracted aftershow on social media for Fox, was picked up by what contestants call the “red boat of death,” aka the backup extraction transportation method when it’s not safe to be picked up by helicopter. “It’s pretty nerve wracking for all of the survivalists,” she shares. “They could hear the boat coming.” She thinks the best part of Extracted is that it’s a “game within a game.”
“You have the survivalists in the jungle by themselves dealing with the mental and physical aspects of it,” Beck says. “Then you have their families who are also dealing with the mental, physical aspects of, oh my gosh, my loved one is out there. There’s definitely a moral dilemma there. And then there’s a lot of strategy and alliances, which I was very surprised by, but in games like this, you have to have that in order to be successful.”
Beck gives a glimpse into the strategies at play this season, hinting at some hoarding of resources and other things that “put a target on their backs.”
“Without giving too much away, you’re going to see that maybe there’s a survivalist that has a lot of supplies and maybe there’s an opportunity for them to get supplies and they get too much and maybe somebody else doesn’t,” she reveals. “And then the families that didn’t get supplies are going to be looking at them like, ‘Wow, are they playing up a game as if this person is unable to survive? So that way they can get the most supplies?’ You’re really going to see both the survivalists and the families have these moral dilemmas, and they’re going to have to come together and trust one another.”
Extracted, Mondays, 8/7c, Fox