'Celebrity Bear Hunt' Review: We’re Not Scared
You’d think 2025 would only offer up one compulsively watchable and inherently flawed reality TV show format. But just as Leanne and That Other Guy were celebrating their Traitors win (wasn’t it amazing how many traitors they thought there might be at the end, and not in any way related to upping their percentage of the prize pot!), along to the rescue comes – who else – Britain’s giant Boy Scout, Bear Grylls with his new Netflix show, Celebrity Bear Hunt. If The Traitors is glorified wink murder, Celebrity Bear Hunt is glorified hide-and-seek, and yes, it’s about as thrilling and jeopardous as that sounds.
In what seems a cut-and-dried case of title preceding concept, the show sees the ever-eager and mud-besmirched adventurer dropped – quite literally, from a helicopter, as appears at this point to be his preference – into the jungle of Costa Rica. There, he is to set challenges for, and subsequently hunt down, a batch of celebrity contestants, some of whom are surprisingly famous (Mel B, Boris Becker) and the rest of whom are adequately famous (including Strictly judge Shirley Ballas, The Saturdays singer Una Healy, rapper and TV host Big Zuu and ex-rugby hottie Danny Cipriani).
In episode one, Bear – through the mouthpiece of the show’s somewhat superfluous presenter Holly Willoughby, in safari-themed attire – gives the bewildered famouses a little taster of what’s in store, by ordering them to make their way to their new home, a frond-thatched beachside lodge, via an over-complicated method of their choosing: helicopter, jeep or small boat with holes in the bottom. While they’re busy completing some confusingly fussy tasks – untangling corks from a bush – he will use his heightened sensory skills to pick them off, relying only on the snapping of a twig, the rustle of a dry leaf, or interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen talking loudly to his accompanying camera crew.
The losers of the challenges – the taster sesh included – must then face “The Bear Pit”: a fenced-off area of allegedly treacherous jungle filled with stock-footage snakes, monkeys, and snapping reptiles. After entering through a set of enormous spiky Mad Max gates, they are given an hour in which to make their way to one of three exits, accessed only with the deployment of – pun apparently not intended – some poorly hidden tools. But they better be quick: Bear is on the prowl. This is the fate that awaits the first four task-failers: Mel B, Laurence L-B, presenter Steph McGovern and model Leomie Anderson. It takes the first episode and a decent chunk of the second to discover which, if any of them, makes it out.
Meanwhile, back at base camp, the other celebs are… Hanging around. Boris B has talked a bit about being in prison while model Lottie “sister of Kate” Moss has rather alarmingly revealed that she was just about to go to rehab but decided to do this TV show instead. The narrative arc of the second episode, however, is given to The Inbetweeners star Joe Thomas, who isn’t saying too much and seems – though it’s no doubt beefed up in the edit as he’s done plenty of silly telly before – to be having some kind of quiet nervous breakdown. Will he be able to steel himself to navigate a wobbly rope bridge strung across a ravine while Big Zuu simultaneously yanks some sacks on a pulley? Truly, it’s nail-biting stuff.
At which point I have to confess to being somewhat disingenuous. I, like a significant part of the viewing public, if the audience figures for season three of The Traitors are anything to go by, am a sucker for nonsense reality formats of this kind. I inhaled the three series of Claudia and her parliament of fools, I can’t get enough of Race Across the World (in the Celebrity version of which Bear Hunt contestant and Ted Lasso star Kola Bokinni also appeared) and I was one of approximately three people who devoured the BBC’s recent doomed attempt at bringing back Survivor, a show that was infinitely more complex and interesting than its competitors and deserved better pick-up. So will floppy-haired Joe win the respect of barrel-chested Big Zuu? I must be told!
Because of course these shows aren’t really about the winners, or the challenges, or the danger. They’re about human interaction: the journeys of self-discovery, the opportunities for growth; also, the revelations of weakness and the displays of supreme idiocy and hubris. With celebrities this is even more extreme, given that they are, for the most part, big babies. I may not be overly invested in whether or not Shirley Ballas manages to overcome her fear of heights, but when the teaser at the end of episode two shows Llewelyn-Bowen boasting about his prowess before a swimming challenge, then being revived by an oxygen bag, I’m 100 per cent here for it (to be fair to Larry, he’s got some funny lines up his paisley-printed sleeve so I hope he pulls through).
Is Celebrity Bear Hunt a good show? Categorically it is not. The format is over-complicated and confusing, the suspense half-baked. When Bear actually catches a celebrity, he taps them on the shoulder, shouts “caught!” and proceeds to tie their wrists, very loosely, with a rope; he then votes them off based on a spurious assessment of their “survival skills”, which seems quite closely connected to how famous they are. But does that mean I won’t be watching the remaining 10 episodes? Gracious no! They’ve already previewed clips of Big Zuu breaking his bed and Lottie Moss calling someone grumpy. Celebrity Bear Hunt is the kind of zero-stakes celebrity ordeal these February nights were made for and so we, too, have got to go through it.
Launches today on Netflix
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