There was a show on discovery for a while that followed some preppers. Watched the first season. Some of the stuff that the people did was cool, but some of the other things was a little out there for me
Two different shows, one is about showcasing techniques in extreme situation and feature an ex british special forces with a heavy background in adventuring while the other is about putting one guy alone in a survival situation for a few days featuring a regular guy who has personal interest in survival.
Though they're not with him, Les stroud also has a support crew and a way to contact them in case of life-threatening emergency.
These were definitely based in history, but they definitely played some things up for TV entertainment. Like suspense of finding something, then cutting to commercial. The closest I can think of in modern times might be Expedition Unknown (on Discovery), but if that were live and on NBC. I wish I could think of what they might have been called, this was early 90s.
It was a cool show, but a lot of the domains I am familiar with (hacking/cybersecurity, programming, compression) were very much made up for the storyline, so I suspect they didn't have much accuracy in domains I don't know much about (superintelligent AI, government surveillance, etc).
Maybe we should have TV shows like this, I can't help but feel anything that gets the general public a bit more aware about how this stuff really works and makes them more suspicious about "bad" practices is a net win. Not to mention that if it had some pretty good writers it would make for quite compelling TV. I'm thinking something in the Crime genre, maybe like CSI?
Not entirely about environment issues, but there's a TV show with something similar as a premise - Continuum. A crime solving drama/sci-fi, where the protagonist is a time traveler coming to our times from year 2070-ish, time when the world is ruled by a Corporate Congress, consisting of thinly veiled allusions to well-known corporations of today. In between all the action and emotional drama, it also delivers some good critique of tech businesses, corporate overreach, and surveillance state.
Great show, not every episode ends in a disaster. These are interesting stories, learning about the circumstances, watching how people handle these high pressure situations many of us would never have to face and the efforts investigators go to finding the cause/causes of the event. One can also take solace in the fact that although these events are tragic, what we learn from them saves more lives in the future.
I would quit my job and drop everything in my life to join a program like that. The Intercept did an episode on it over the summer and I got chills listening to it.
A series where people used technical surveillance using devices like these (IOTINT? IDK what the term of art is yet), OSINT from online things like FB, various forms of legal process (civil, LE, NS, and extralegal), etc. to go after "terrorists" down to criminals of various crimes down to "enemies of the Party" down to "people who slightly antagonize employees of the Agency" to "for the lulz" would be interesting.
More like Homeland than The Wire, though. Or, uh, Black Mirror.
It's one of my favorite shows because it's at least plausible, and felt that way even before the 2013 revelations. A lot of the tech and storylines in the show are of course fictionalized and a bit "out there", but the core concepts it presents are at least within the bounds of possibility. I tend to view it both as suspension-of-disbelief popcorn entertainment, and as a telling allegory on today's surveillance state.
"The premise of the series is that the two get lost together in various locales such as Austin and Anchorage, and have to solve various mysteries of their surroundings using AT&T phones"
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