Previewing 72 Hours

Last year TNT got into the reality game with The Great Escape. It was an interesting concept which was basically The Amazing Race pared down to just one episode. The big problem though was it was pretty much the same episode over and over again with just the location changing. Sure the contestants changed too but they were all too boring it did not really matter so every subsequent episode got less and less interesting. The Great Escape only last one season, but that did not deter TNT’s alternative programming; the debuted Boston's Finest earlier this year and even has two new competition series premiering over the next two days.

More on The Hero tomorrow, but tonight premieres a show very similar to The Great Escape. Where The Great Escape cribbed The Amazing Race, 72 Hours takes MTV’s The Challenge and chops off the first chunk of the season and each episode is basically just the final challenge but takes place in Survivor type locals so that means 72 Hours will feature something that The Great Escape sorely missed: hot chicks in bikinis (or dude without shirts if you are into that kind of stuff). And in the first three episodes, there is not one female over the age of thirty-five but there are males are as old as fifty.

There are three teams on 72 Hours of three contestants each. There is no food, no shelter, and just one bottle of water. And each episode they have to transverse tropical locations to find a case of money with nothing but a GPS system. There are three supply drops with a bunch of supplies that they have to decide to take with them. The items may be useful, but then again it may just weigh them down. If they need it, that can call in a “relief drop” that comes with water, food, and other necessary supplies, but if they call it in, they get a one hour penalty and basically have to sit there for the time before it comes (and then if they want to cook the food then, they would have to burn even more time).

Unlike The Great Escape, the personalities of the contestants really shine through and attitudes run high because the teams are all made up of strangers so the patience you may show for your sister may not be there for some random dude from Canada. I am not entirely sure where the title of 72 Hours came from. There really is no time limit even though the tasks are designed to take you over three days to complete. The host never says it has to be completed in a certain amount of time so I wonder if it will end up taking any teams four days or more to complete. And they do not compete for the entire 72 hour either because they only race from sunrise to sunset. But 72 Hours is an upgrade from The Great escape but I wonder after a couple episodes it will also start having diminishing returns. Even worse, each adventure does not take place on a beach (two episodes later in the season will take place in interior America) so not ever episode will feature got chicks in bikinis. Survivor learned after two seasons in the middle of Australia and Africa they should stay on the beach, if 72 Hours gets another season, they stay in the tropics where less clothing is more.

72 Hours airs Thursdays at 9:00 on TNT.