Jon Krakauer once said of mountaineering, “There’s something about being afraid, about being small, about enforced humility that draws me to climbing.†The contestants of The Summit are perhaps taking that idea too literally. The 16 Americans flew to New Zealand to cross 100 miles by climbing the country’s Southern Alps (the highest peak is 12,218 feet) over 14 days, all while carrying $1 million in cash. Yet somehow, none of them seems aware that they signed up to, you know, ascend an actual mountain, a reveal that is simultaneously cruel and sicko-mode hilarious. Enforced humility, it makes for good TV!
The Summit is based on an Australian reality series that premiered in 2023. But when host Manu Bennett greets the competitors with, “Your challenge is to reach the summit,†their reaction is like that one time The Traitors made the housemates identify bird calls: blank faces and shocked exclamations all around. “To reach the what?†one contestant asks. “Honey, that is a big fucking mountain,†says another. To which I ask: What was in the casting call for this show? How do you sign up for a reality competition that demands a certain amount of outdoor know-how and physical and mental preparedness and then lack that outdoor know-how and physical-mental preparedness? Not every show can have contestants on the level of Physical: 100, and of course, not every person who signs up for Survivor, The Amazing Race, The Challenge, Naked and Afraid, Alone, or any other survival competition is going to be at peak physical fitness. But those casts have at least some idea of what to expect. The first leader of the The Summit contestants doesn’t know how to read a map!
Of course, this is “reality†television, so it’s possible The Summit cast was hamming it up for the cameras. But I am really leaning toward, “No, these people agreed to go to a foreign location and do an undefined thing, with no awareness of how wild it was going to get,†because many of them are extremely unprepared for this climb. Most say they’re there to prove something to themselves, to younger people in their lives, or to those who underestimate them because of how they look, act, or sound. But to quote Krakauer again, “mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.†A mountain is not the place to work out your shit!
As they begin their climb in the premiere, one contestant passes out, several struggle under the weight of the cash and camping supplies in their backpacks (another hands his pack off to another competitor), and one of the hardest-charging contestants reveals himself to be deathly afraid of heights. Multiple players convince themselves they’re going to succeed because they managed to walk a few miles in one day; the goal is to walk roughly seven per day and reach regular checkpoints along the way, but the group has to sleep outside their first night when they fail to reach the first shelter in time. Seemingly none of these people watched Triple Frontier, a very fun movie in which a group of mostly hot American veterans struggles to carry millions of dollars they stole from a drug lord up a mountain. If a bunch of super-fit ex-military dudes couldn’t handle such a challenge, why does this bunch of normies think they can? A major judgment error!
To be fair, some of the contestants are also ex-military, a couple are former college athletes, and there’s a guy who looks like he does a lot of CrossFit and says very pretentiously that it’s his “pet peeve†when “folks are out of shape and unhealthy.†Again: That is not the same thing as knowing how to climb a mountain, an activity that requires endurance, strong calves and ankles, breath training as you reach higher altitudes, knowledge of ice-climbing tools like crampons and axes, and an intense focus and awareness of your own body. The competitors are clipped in when they cross rope bridges, but you can’t just slip on a ridge; a sprained ankle can be devastating.
This blank-slate quality gives The Summit a grimly fascinating voyeurism — and prompts ageism and ableism in both its younger, slimmer contestants (who assume they’ll succeed automatically) and viewers (who might reflexively judge the older, less-thin contestants for their slower pace). “You must travel together,†Bennett instructs, yet the challenges are set up to sow division. Contestants who walk slower are blamed for reducing the group’s pace. At the first rope-bridge crossing, they must vote for a leader to choose which pairs cross the bridge together, a decision-making process that inspires comments on each other’s weight and size. On the second bridge, which individuals cross alone to lay down wooden planks for those who follow, one contestant says she’s too petite to handle the plank, while another says he’s so fit he can handle two boards. (He drops both.)
Then there are the mandates from the mysterious “Mountain’s Keeper,†a sort of secondary host who serves as the mountain’s “eyes†and forces the contestants to abandon those lagging behind. A larger man collapses as a woman sniffs that maybe he’s just craving sugar; the group’s younger members grumble about an older contestant’s request for a water break. When money is on the line, there should be no expectation for Great British Baking Show–style camaraderie. But even for a series in such a recognizable format, The Summit encourages some of the quickest snap judgments based on physicality I’ve ever seen.
The problem with The Summit falling into a fat-thin, young-old binary is that, in reality, none of these people should be tasked with climbing through “lung-burning altitudes, a freezing alpine lake, and a dangerous glacial traverse†toward a “final icy ascent,†as Bennett puts it. I don’t think this show is going to kill anyone. But I do think The Summit is guilty of the exact flattening of a perilous experience Krakauer warned against in Into Thin Air, a first-person account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster that left numerous climbers dead and others stranded on the mountain in the middle of a devastating storm. Krakauer wrote about how mountaineering’s sudden mainstream popularity led people to believe they were physically and mentally capable of doing things they probably shouldn’t. Bubble-wrapping an extreme activity into something neat and approachable for a group of people with no experience makes for entertaining television that follows the rhythms of reality-TV scheming and strategizing. But when one of the series’s early villains, a 28-year-old woman bragging about how well she did on her SATs (suspiciously without naming the actual score), describes The Summit’s challenge by way of Legally Blonde — “What, like it’s hard?â€Â — I can’t help but think, yeah, it probably should be.