Ari Mark, co-founder of Ample Entertainment, talks about his hybrid natural history/reality survival series Hungry Games: Alaska’s Big Bear Challenge, and what it says about the current state of the US unscripted commissioning model.

Ari Mark

Tell us about the origins of the show.
Hungry Games: Alaska’s Big Bear Challenge on Peacock is a three-part natural history/reality competition hybrid. It requires the audience to buy into life-and-death stakes of survival, but also in this tongue-in-cheek tone which makes it disarming, in a good way.

Why do it like this and not as a straight natural history series?
The natural history space is not easy. None of the spaces are, but there is such a specific skillset and a specific pool of talent that knows how to make natural history that there’s usually not a lot of room for breaking the mould. There’s also a very small group of producers, filmmakers, directors and talent who are given permission to make natural history. And they’re all living in one place. That didn’t feel right for us, and we’ve been trying to bring a different flavour to the genre because it feels like it needs one.

With this series there is pre-existing knowledge of how the bears behave, the locations they hang out and seasonally what we can expect them to be doing. The hardest part is the economic reality of producing natural history – you really need to have your ducks in a row and be able to telegraph locations, behaviours and any obstacles that that might come up in the environment.

After that it became, ‘How do we take this to the next level?’ Pitching a show about bears being cute or cool or surviving isn’t really enough. The most striking thing about the bears’ behaviour is they come out of hibernation frazzled and thin and they are then really under the gun to consume as many calories as possible over the course of a season. So, organically, we’re following a life-or-death competition between them and you can assign and establish characters to them from there and build out a narrative story arc.

And the idea is to format this, potentially with other species?
Yes, that’s the reason the title is what it is and we definitely pitched it with that in mind. It is hard to be hyper-focused on making something cool while also thinking about it three years down the line, but that was always in the back of my mind to create a franchisable idea. It was helpful that Peacock and Love Nature recognised that and wanted to go with a title like Hungry Games. You could do wolves in Yellowstone, lions in Africa – it’s got a lot of legs.

How would you assess the current state of the unscripted market?
I’ve been ringing this bell for a while. There was a massive boom in unscripted – I missed it but I’ve heard about it – but it hasn’t been great for a very long time.

If you know how to make things, and I don’t mean tell other people how to make things, I think you’re fine. If you need to rely on somebody to come running into your office with a great idea or access you might have a problem. We’re a small, scrappy team who know how to piece things together and make them happen. There’s a reason we’re in 10 different genres. You go with the ebb and flow, not just of the market but with your own instincts of what feels right.

Hungry Games: Alaska’s Big Bear Challenge has the capacity to become a franchise focusing on different species

The thing that’s gotten harder for us hasn’t been creating new shows or selling new shows. That hasn’t been the issue. The issue for us has been that the business model doesn’t work. The long-term reality is if networks are only commissioning three partners, or cheap coproductions, and there’s no promise of volume then all of the infrastructure we’ve spent years building and the overhead that requires to keep going is unsustainable.

That’s the thing that makes you great – a small handful of people you work with on every show which, from a network standpoint, gives a sense of security, familiarity and professionalism. I would think that’s what networks want. If you have to change your team every show or hire a new batch of people because you can’t keep them in-house because the volume is not there, we all lose.

So is it ‘survive to 25’ or is it more broken than that?
I don’t know where that phrase came from or what it means. I think it’s people’s way of saying it’s got to get better.

The fact of the matter is, right now, there’s an opportunity. Whether we can see it or not is another story. Some really clever people out there are figuring it out. They’re willing to bet on themselves and although stuff is kind of shitty right now, they’re going to emerge out of this with a body of work or a pipeline of IP. That is going to be valuable as we come out of this, not only because of a lack of product but also because it will force a certain kind of ingenuity.

Making cheap content can be really, really fun because it’s like trying to win and beat the system. I’m going to prove to you we can take two people and make this show for US$250,000 and it’ll look like it cost US$2m. It’s not easy, it’s a challenge, but people who crack these things are going to come out of this and have proven there is another way.

There is definitely an indie television thing that’s happening. The UK is way ahead of us because they’re used to a single-camera filmmaker follower, they don’t have 17 people doing one job, they’ve got a guy who’s directing but also sometimes shooting, and that’s the best way to go right now. Contraband: Seized at the Border is a great example of a show like this on Discovery+. If you can do that and borrow from the UK model while being savvy in an American way, there’s a huge opportunity.