The Cutprice Guignol

When you think of Eden, what comes to mind? Paradise? Peace? Harmony? Simplicity? Whatever your answer, I’d wager a guess that it’s nothing close to what eventually became of Eden, the reality TV series that left twenty-three people stranded in the highlands of Scotland for a year to build a functioning community from scratch, cut off from modern life and reliant on the land and their fellow contestants to survive. What they didn’t know, however, was that the show was canned after just four episodes were broadcast – and that, when it finally returned, they’d be landed in the middle of a row about sexism.

In July 2016, a new reality TV show from Channel 4 was about to hit the air: Eden. Plenty of major media outlets covered the new release, which was due out in mid-July and claimed a pretty impressive premise. The show would follow twenty-three people (thirteen men and ten women) from various walks of life, all of whom had agreed to step away from modern existence for a year in order to build a community in the Scottish highlands, from scratch. That meant they had to find ways to feed themselves, come up with laws and rules that they would enforce, and create solutions to tackle various problems as they arose – to create, basically, their own Eden. With a tiny four-person crew filming proceedings, and strict rules regarding contact with the outside world, it promised a gritty, back-to-basics reality program that was focused on a social experiment instead of contrived competition. Nobody would be eliminated and voted off – they just had to work together for a year, avoid going too William Golding in the process, and viewers would tune in every week to see how their community had started to either thrive or fall apart.

A pretty interesting premise, all things considered, and one that seemed to tap in to various trendy topics, both in pop culture and UK society at large at the time. Shows like Naked and Afraid (which started in 2013), Bear Grylls’ The Island (2014), and Alone (2015) had proved that there was a taste for survivalist reality television, and political tensions in the UK had left plenty of people craving a return to the basics. The setting, a beautiful corner of Ardnamuchan in Invernes-Shire (just a few hours away from where I grew up), seemed the perfect backdrop for such an endeavour: as untouched as you were going to find in most of the UK (that Channel 4 could also afford to buy sole use of for the length of the show’s run). Producer Liz Foley, in the run-up to the show’s release, promised that they were “not short of stories…it’s not totally harmonious, but it’s not explosive in a negative sense”.

Local businesses were hopeful about the show bringing a boost to the economy, and, despite a few complaints about the Highland Council’s handling of the situation (but then, what’s new?), contestants arrived on 23rd March, 2016 to begin filming ahead of the planned July premier.

As for the contestants themselves, early coverage of the show claimed that they had been selected for the various skills they could bring to the attempts to build a new community. Some of them came from backgrounds that had obvious application in the endeavour – Glenn, a gamekeeper, Katie, a forager, Lloyd, a fisherman – while others seemed a little more oblique (like Tara the life coach). They were allowed to bring some of the tools of their trade with them to the new community, along with some personal items (like tobacco and chocolate).

The few episode is pretty much what you would expect from such a program – one-time Doctor Who actor Paul McGann narrates proceedings as the participants arrive in the Highlands and hike across their new Eden to find each other. They eventually congregate across two of the existing buildings on the property, and set about building the essentials – a toilet, a shower, somewhere they can sleep away from the elements. While the show (slightly haughtily) in its promotional material went out of its way to distance itself from reality TV competitions like Love Island, the first episode teased some potential romance unfolding between various contestants (mostly under the influence of moonshine).

The first episode, which pulled in just under two million viewers, wasn’t exactly the seminal TV hit Channel 4 had clearly been expecting it to be. Social media responses were lukewarm, at best, with some viewers criticizing the show for allowing the contestants to use too many modern amenities, with others just calling it downright boring. The show garnered criticism for its treatment of animals and the death of a goat in the first episode. TV critic Stuart Heritage, for the Guardian, described it as “Love Island with trench foot”. Overall, things weren’t looking good.

But the show continued in its weekly slot, picking up where it had left off in following the participants as they tried to build this new community from scratch. Where the show had billed itself as a gritty look into real people against the odds and the elements really just…isn’t that interesting, from a storytelling perspective. Eden lacks the big personalities you’d expect from a series of this nature; every conflict seems to fizzle out before it really start to go anywhere. The participants start to get tired of their mostly-potato diet, but no need to worry, some local fishermen drop off a care package of food nearby. One of the members of the group takes some of their supplies without asking, and, after an argument, storms off into the snow – but he turns up the next day, having cleared his head with a walk. The most intense the conflict gets is when the group turns on Tana, the life coach, accusing her of not pulling her weight, but she soon winds up working as the group’s masseuse.

Much as the production team were clearly trying to hash out some narrative from the footage they got, the show never really found its feet – the conflicts are more niggling than compelling, the participants just about competent enough to make things work, but not in a way that was particularly impressive. And this lack of interesting throughline was reflected in the declining viewership, with the audience creeping down to less than 800,000 by the time the fourth episode aired in mid-August.

The fourth episode ended with Tana Zieleman5 quitting the show, and, in perhaps the only part that actually made me laugh out loud, the rest of the group erected what looks to be a small grave marker with the date of her departure, May 24th, 2016. And then…

The show’s first season came to an abrupt end. The official Twitter page for Eden promised that the show would return in Autumn of that year, and posted frequent updates in the following weeks of what the remaining participants were up to, with a distinct focus on cute animal pictures. Possibly to distract from the interviews with Tana that had appeared in the press shortly after her departure, in which she described a profoundly nasty atmosphere: other participants in Eden referred to her as a “lazy bitch”, she was pushed to do demeaning jobs such as cleaning up animal waste, and was often kept up at night by other contestants getting hot and heavy in the straw bunk beds next to hers. She claimed that sexual competition and tension was rife, and that she had been singled out as a victim of bullying by the other women on the compound – many of whom, she said, had full make-up routines that they did every morning, despite the show’s claims of a back-to-basics lifestyle.

Posts on the show’s official social media began to peter out, until one final picture (of one of the participants cradling a baby goat) was shared on October 7th. After that, nothing – despite promises of a second season in Autumn 2016, the months came and went, with no update on the next episode of Channel 4’s audacious social experiment. By all accounts, it looked like the show was dead in the water.

Except, for the participants back on the Ardnamuchan peninsula, nothing had changed.

Participants had signed up for a year-long experiment, cut off from social media, contact with the outside world, and, presumably, Channel 4’s catch-up service. As a result, they weren’t informed that the show had been pulled from production, and the small community continued with no idea that the programme hadn’t broadcast another episode since August. The small crew remained, along with the various members who had been designated to record the goings-on in Eden, and the community continued to grind against the odds – and the elements – until their year in the wilderness had come to its close.

Channel 4 kept tight-lipped on the status of the show and the contestants, but local gossip made its way to Scottish newspapers like The Press and Journal, who reported, over the months following the show’s final episode, what appeared to be the slow deterioration of the experiment. By September 4th, articles claimed that ten contestants had abandoned the project to return home, as hunger and cold got the better of them – as well as midgies (small biting insects, which really don’t sound too bad, until you’ve lived in the Highlands during Spring and Summer and have to beat your way to the outside bins with a tennis racket just to keep them at bay) worse than the area had seen in twenty years. In October, reports from a Highland Council meeting seemed to indicate that the production team were planning a second season, and intended to apply for further permissions to use the land that Eden was being shot on once more, despite the fact that only four episodes of the show had actually made it to air.

Over the next few months, as Eden approached its end, locals remarked on the rule-breaking taking place amongst the remaining group – alcohol and junk food was smuggled in to Eden regularly, with some members even seeking dental care at a nearby village after eating gritty chicken feed damaged their teeth. Numbers dwindled further and further, leaving just ten participants left by the time the project came to an end in March 2017 – with Channel 4 failing to announce a release date for the rest of the show. Participants emerged to find out that Britain had voted to leave the UK in the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump had been elected president of the USA – and, perhaps most gallingly, that their struggles and trials hadn’t been parlayed into the compelling social experiment they had been promised. Paradise was, officially, it seemed, lost.

When it comes to looking at exactly what went wrong with the series, there are a few angles to approach it from. I think the most significant factor, as discussed by Channel 4’s commissioning editor Ian Dunkley: “We wanted to focus on the strongest stories and characters, and we could only be sure of that once the year had played out”. The producers were trying to put together a compelling narrative that would span a whole year, with just a few months’ worth of footage at a time. Identifying key players and crafting stories that will keep viewers engaged is hard enough at the best of times, let alone when you have no idea where the story might go – with the show’s premise of a hands-off approach that allowed participants to create this community organically, which is to say, without heavy-handed producer involvement to nudge the stories in an interesting direction, Eden, in retrospect, seemed doomed from the start.

And doomed it seemed to remain, until all at once, there came an announcement from Channel 4: more than a year after the broadcast of the first episode, in August 2017, a second season of the show was to hit the air. Not Eden as we knew it, but Eden: Paradise Lost. The first episode description was pretty damn ominous: “In March 2016, 23 men and women left everyday life behind to start anew in a remote part of the British Isles. Soon, their dream turned into a nightmare”.

Eden: Paradise Lost served as the sequel to Eden, and a sort of behind-the-scenes look at what was really going on as the participants tried to build this new community from scratch. What is showed, for the most part, was that the experiment had been a bust since it began, with rules being broken, phones being used, and participants allowed to leave and return in order to bolster dwindling numbers.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the second season of the show was the sexism that appeared to plague the group from early into its conception – with harsh lines being drawn between women and men’s work, and one male member of the group cutting down rations for those doing less physical work (most of whom happened to be women). Locker room talk between the men seemed to abound, with scenes of women being interrogated about whether they’d do anal sex as the men tried to narrow down who they’d most like to have sex with in the group. Just five women remained for the entire year, of the ten who originally joined. One of them, Katie, saw her self-made home, the Rabbit Hole, burned down on the last day of the experiment, after clashing with various men in the community.

It’s perhaps no surprise that this aspect was so heavily featured by the show, and picked up on by the media in the aftermath of its broadcast; sexism was (and remains, honestly) a huge topic of conversation within the media at the time, with the #MeToo movement exploding in popularity just a couple of months after the show finished. Paradise Lost, with its claims of taking things back to basics and revealing humanity at its barest core, offered what seemed to be a realistic and decidedly depressing portrayal of how in-built this sexism seemed to be. Even in the nascent stages of a new community, sexism served as one of the holdovers from the old world.

The participants in the show, both on and off camera, had varying reactions to the media focus on sexism in Paradise Lost. Katie, one of the handful of women who made it to the end of the experiment, remarked to the Guardian that she had live[d] among crofters and I’ve worked with the military but I’ve never been limited by gender, so it was a shock”, while Jane, a female member of the camera crew, admitted to holding back on some of her opinions on the treatment of women in the group in order to maintain good relationships with the cast -“as a woman, I regret not feeling able to stand up for what I believed in 100%,” she said. “As a professional cameraperson, I’m quite proud.”

The male participants, many of whom came under fire for their apparent sexist behaviour, protested their depiction on the show. One man, Stephen, argued to Vice that Channel 4 had seen an opportunity to jump on a zeitgeist and greatly exaggerate incidences of sexism in the community – “People are thinking, ‘I wanna see those sexist arseholes.’” Glenn, another participant in Eden, claimed that the show as it was broadcast “wasn’t an experience [he] recognized” and that there was “another side to that story”. In an interview with the Daily Mail, he was quoted as describing Kate a “spiteful” and “duplicitous”.

Eventually, interest in the show died down – the contestants did not earn much in the way of long-term reality-TV fame, and Eden swiftly faded from public memory. Both as a TV show and an attempt to build a new society, Eden had been a disaster nearly from start to finish – but it holds the questionable title of one of the strangest reality TV experiments in history.

Did you watch Eden as it was coming out? If you did, what did you make of it? I would love to hear about it in the comments below!

More of my writing on reality TV and social media:

The Rise and Fall of Drag Race España: An Analysis

The Eras Tour, the Friendship Bracelets, and the $150 Brunch: The Taylor Swift Holiday House Scandal

Sources and Further Reading

Reality TV’s Wildest Disaster – The New York Times

Shona Craven’s recaps and reviews of Eden and Eden: Paradise Lost

If you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or buying my books! You can also check out my other longform content here.

(header image via Channel 4)