Jonathan LaPaglia Asks Whether We Could Survive the End of the World in BINGE’s ‘Apocalypse’
Jonathan LaPaglia has spent years watching Australians attempt to outwit, outplay and outlast one another. Now, he’s narrating a considerably bigger survival challenge.
BINGE’s new original reality series Apocalypse has premiered in Australia, dropping a group of ordinary Australians and Brits into an abandoned American city and challenging them to survive for 28 days without the comforts of modern life.
The eight-part series launched Wednesday with a double-episode premiere on BINGE, with LaPaglia — best known to Australian audiences as the longtime host of Australian Survivor — serving as narrator.
Fourteen participants are transported to an abandoned city in rural Indiana, a location now used as an urban warfare training facility.
There are no phones, electricity or running water, while food and other supplies must be found and rationed by the contestants themselves.
The participants are also divided into two groups, with neither initially aware that another community is attempting to survive nearby.
It’s a premise designed to push reality television’s familiar social dynamics into something resembling a post-apocalyptic society: finding shelter and resources while determining who should lead and how a community should function when normal rules disappear.
The cast includes participants from both Australia and the UK, ranging from farmers and paramedics to mechanics, content creators and a politician.
For LaPaglia, however, years spent observing survival contestants have apparently produced one fairly straightforward conclusion about what humans would actually need if society collapsed.
“We need each other to survive,” he told The Australian Women’s Weekly ahead of the show’s Australian launch.
Apocalypse is a co-commission between BINGE and Britain’s Channel 4 and is produced by The Garden, the company behind Squid Game: The Challenge, alongside ITV Studios Australia, producer of Alone Australia.
The series also arrives as BINGE places greater emphasis on locally commissioned programming following the arrival of HBO Max in Australia.
And while Australian reality television has hardly been short of survival formats, Apocalypse considerably expands the scale.
Rather than voting contestants off an island, its participants are being asked to build something approaching a functioning society from scratch.
Whether they manage it is another question entirely.
Apocalypse is streaming now on BINGE, with new episodes releasing weekly.