Discovery Channel announces Survival Live, a Hunger Games-like reality competition

Imagine The Hunger Games without the actual risk of death and you have the basic premise of Discovery Channel’s upcoming reality competition, Survival Live.

In the yet-to-be-filmed series, eight eager survivalists will get dropped off in a remote wilderness location. With nothing more than the clothes on their backs, they must get by for 42 days — making Survivor sound like a walk in the park.

“We have a lot of people who want to test their mettle on our survival shows,” Eileen O’Neill, group president of Discovery and TLC Networks, exclusively told Hollywood Reporter. “These are pretty rugged environments, so we do background checks and psych checks, and that reduces the pool to choose from pretty quickly.”

The program will air on Discovery twice week, with one live episode and one pre-recorded show. Viewers can also track competitors 24/7 via live steaming video. During the live episodes, the week’s weakest contestant — as determined by biometrics — will get booted back to the real world (presumably losing their chance at some unannounced prize).

In addition to surviving, competitors will compete to build social networks, aka fan bases. Interactive viewers can then send certain items to struggling survivalists, kind of like those little packages coaches send to Hunger Game competitors.

The Discovery executive explained, “It’s a really fascinating opportunity to take one of our strongest genres, survival, and mash it up with a live environment, but also do it in a very social and digital way.”

Survival Live will premiere on Discovery in 2014.