Man vs. Truth: Bear grilled on chicanery

Say you're a tough-as-nails outdoorsman with a magnetic personality and your own show on the Discovery Channel ... and then it comes out you were actually shacking up in a hotel room some nights and re-enacting your brawniest moments. You'd probably want to head out into the woods and never look back, right? That's not the case with Bear Grylls, host of Discovery's survival reality show Man vs. Wild -- though he says fallout from the controversy hasn't been easy. "I'm not bulletproof underneath it all," Grylls told Outside magazine, according to the New York Daily News. "It made a good headline: 'Bear stays in motel when filming,' but the truth is a bit less exciting. I spend a lot of nights under the stars, and for the times when I am not filming the live stuff out in the wild, or I'm about to illustrate something really physically exhausting, I stay with the crew in a base-camp lodge. As to the question, 'Are things ever staged?' The answer is, on occasions, yes. We have to condense so much action into a few days, and that involves good prior planning." Grylls recently wrapped filming on the next season of Man vs. Wild, which will take him to Panama, Patagonia, Siberia and the Sahara. Producers have promised the show will be more transparent this time around.

(Handout photo)

Comments

[Boe]

I was just getting ready to go out and buy the first season on DVD when news of this first came out. I won't waste my money now. If you go back and watch the older episodes knowing what we now know the show is very misleading. The thing that really riles me up is how unapologetic Bear is about this. He doesn't want to accept responsibility for misleading the public and I think he lost a lot of fans of his show.