Already my second favorite reality competition show, Netflix's Siren: Survive the Island is a reality TV show featuring six teams of women from various professions competing in a large scale capture the flag on an isolated island in one intense week.
I watched this show early this month right after watching The Devil's Plan since I got this recommended on Netflix, and WOW, it was so intense and fun the entire way through. The premise is that six teams of women from various tough professions in which women are underrepresented compete to establish who's the best both physically and strategically.
The professions are: firefighters, Olympic athletes, police, military soldiers, stunt performers, and bodyguards. Between them, these women have strength, agility, combat skills, and strategic thinking, which they can showcase as they secure their bases and flags on the island and try to capture the bases of others.
With each team consisting of only four people to carry out both offensive and defensive missions and sometimes against allied groups, each person has to pull their weight. I love the idea of people competing as teams from start to finish, and I especially love games based on large scale offense/defense.
Each round consists of a Base Battle, which begins whenever the siren goes off, and I really mean whenever, because there's no set time and the teams never know. This is the only time during which the teams can go after each other's bases. When a team's flag is found and stolen, that team is out and their base belongs to whoever captured it.
There's also an Arena Battle during which the teams compete to secure an important asset that can help them during the Base Battle.
In addition to these battles, the teams can get food and supplies from the island store by exchanging the calories that they've burnt while competing and working out on the island the previous day.
Alliances between teams definitely come into play as well. There was an awesome moment when two teams ran into each other during a base battle and someone shouted out that they should team up to get a third team out, and they all immediately agreed and got to business.
There's only one complaint I had about this whole show, and that was the elimination island. It's pretty obvious from the start that the eliminated players go somewhere else, even though this isn't revealed until later on, and like in many reality shows, they're given a chance to come back. But what they have to do is just this simple but grueling physical task that catered only to one team, so the others didn't really have a shot. I feel like they should've had a mini game or battle of their own.
I guess I also have a tiny complaint about the opening task, which again didn't suit certain teams due to their skillsets differing greatly from the task required, but ultimately this only factored into a small part of the overall competition. It did feel like teams that had more brute strength seemed to fare better than those with less strength but more combat skill, so that's something to keep in mind in terms of game design. There was also no reward for the winning team except honor and glory.
Despite any promotion at all, I hope this show still did well enough to garner another season. Since it's in Korean, I don't expect as many people to be aware of it as they would have been if it were an American show, but the show can easily be molded to have versions in different countries. They can also do different variations and showcase different careers or different types of bases. Ultimately, it's still capture the flag so there don't need to be any new twists to make it fun to watch as long as the cast and the editing continue to be great.
And please do not do a male version of this. Not only would men seriously injure and maim each other, but they're already overrepresented in these professions and the point of this show is to highlight the women in those professions.
Hopefully in the coming year or two, I'll get not only more seasons of this, but more reality competition shows like it overall.
And now for some brief spoilers for those who have seen the show...
I think we can all agree that the soldier team sucked. Maybe it was just that one girl, but they felt like they were taking this as seriously as an actual war. Breaking into the police team's base by using a glass breaking tool that they brought with them was WAY too much, like someone could've gotten seriously hurt.
I rooted for the firefighter team from the beginning, but man did they make a couple dumb calls here and there. It was really funny though when the other teams were worried sick at 8am, waiting for the battle to start, and then it cut to the firefighters passed out and sleeping in.
I was okay with the athletes winning. They worked well together, and frankly, it was the firefighters' own fault for hiding their flag somewhere so obvious and somehow managing to get all their members out.
Like I mentioned earlier, it was awesome when the athletes and firefighters teamed up on a whim and went after the stunt team in their very difficult to invade base. The police team was unfortunately really dumb and left one person to guard their whole base alone. It would've been interesting to see one of those two teams return from the eliminated camp, but since the task was to roll a super heavy ball, of course the soldiers made it back first. It made the whole thing kind of pointless.
The guard team was the only team that didn't really make an impact. It was a shame, because in their introductory video, they looked really cool, but their base was so far out of the way that by the time they showed up anywhere, the fight was pretty much over. Teaming up with the soldiers didn't seem to help either them or the soldiers very much anyway.
As for the winners, maybe in the future they could add a financial award and retroactively reward the athletes some money, even if Olympic level athletes are probably comparatively well off. It just feels weird that the show ended with them running off into the distance without winning anything. While it definitely looked cool and worked as an ending, it could've used something more.
But honestly, I had such a blast watching this that I didn't even care and simply just wanted more.