Stream It Or Skip It: ‘You Vs. Wild: Out Cold’ on Netflix, An Interactive Experience Featuring Bear Grylls And A Lot Of Choices

Now’s your chance to tell Bear Grylls where he can stick it. In You vs. Wild: Out Cold (Netflix), an interactive feature allows viewers to guide the adventurer and former Man vs. Wild host through the latest batch of rough terrain he’s found himself in. What’s most imperative, food or water? Does he hide from an approaching wild animal, or scare it away with loud noises? “You” click to find out just how “Wild” things get. 

YOU VS. WILD: OUT COLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In a desolate mountain region peaked with snow-covered crags and blanketed by pine forest and icy scrub land, Bear Grylls is dangling upside down from a tree, tangled in his parachute and completely out cold. “Mayday! Mayday! Come in, is anyone out there?” a man’s voice squawks from a nearby radio. And as Grylls comes to and cuts himself loose, it becomes clear that he’s got another problem — amnesia. “I’m gonna need your help,” the adventurer says to the camera, and he sets off in search of water, or food, or shelter. But which necessity for survival does he find first? Amnesic Grylls, lost on a mountain in an interactive world, needs the viewer to help make this decision. Clickable boxes appear on screen, and suddenly it’s time to choose Bear’s adventure.

You vs. Wild: Out Cold is an outgrowth of Bear Grylls’ adventure TV fiefdom, shows like Man vs. Wild and the celebrity-infused Running Wild with Bear Grylls where the name of the game is survivability in harsh conditions. With the additional technological wrinkle of interactivity, the hook with Out Cold isn’t how Grylls will get out, but how you’ll get him out. In one clickable scenario, Grylls, hamfistedly playing up the amnesia angle, moves to fashion a lean-to from an uprooted tree trunk and the remains of his parachute. He tells the camera that the movements feel correct, almost like instinct, but that he doesn’t know why he has the skill. No matter, because he’s soon flushed from that shelter by an approaching wolf. Oh no! Should he try to lose it in the forest below, or scramble up the mountainside to the bare rocks above the treeline? That’s for you to decide. “What are you waiting for?!” Grylls yells, high-tailing it from the predator.

Whatever the viewer’s choices, it becomes clear that Grylls has to rescue the pilot of the aircraft he parachuted from, who crash landed somewhere on the other side of the mountain. There are various routes he can take, and along the way he imparts some nature-based factoid knowledge, explaining the broader points of altitude sickness, say, or the relative energy one can source from cockroach consumption. And when the pilot is located at long last, it’s time to skip back and You vs. Wild it again, only with a different set of prompts.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Out Cold and its counterpart Animals on the Loose are standalone titles stemming from You vs. Wild, the interactive series Bear Grylls debuted on Netflix in 2019. The streamer also scored in the interactive space with 2018’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, and has more recently woven the feature into comedy with the decidedly wacky Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs the Reverend.

Performance Worth Watching: “I’m gonna need your help here”; “whatever killed this, it’s definitely more powerful than me.” Bear Grylls reaches right through the fourth wall with his trademark enthusiasm intact. The veteran TV personality manages to really sell the interactive piece of You vs. Wild: Out Cold by simply radiating acceptance of it, which in turn dulls the voice that tells you how silly most of it is. And with each set of choices, you find yourself more and more willing to click away to maybe save his day.

Memorable Dialogue:  “Great job! Your survival skills were on full alert!” Out Cold hits viewers with that sweet, sweet dopamine rush of approval whenever a survivable, successful route is chosen for Grylls.

Sex and Skin: No way.

Our Take: The learning segments of classic children’s programs like Sesame Street and The Electric Company were doing interactivity in the 1970s and ‘80s — they just didn’t have the tech. They’d ask youthful viewers at home to consider a group of numbers, and potential outcomes, as a kid onscreen poured varying amounts of water into buckets of different sizes. Or maybe they’d present an animated series of letters, forming and changing with different sounds — it was you vs. phonics. Those programs would’ve readily adopted the clickthrough interactivity of You vs. Wild: Out Cold, so it’s natural for it to be used in this way; this isn’t so much a movie as it is a means of keeping kids and curious adults entertained and occasionally educated for 45 minutes to an hour, connecting each choice Bear Grylls might make to its available outcomes. There’s no plot, beyond the sketch of a crash, amnesia, and surviving the elements. There’s definitely no subplot. There’s just Grylls, his gear, his rope, and his occasional looks into the camera at you, the viewer, his silent expedition partner who’s an expert at clicking.

Whenever Grylls reaches a choice junction, suspenseful music builds and the onscreen tools appear, clickable options in boxes and a horizontal line dwindling as you burn precious seconds. It’s a fun, visual interface that juices the tension effectively, and is sure to inspire younger viewers to shout out their picks for what’s next as fast as possible. But this isn’t infinity Grylls. Follow the prompts and aid the adventurer in his quest, and with a resolution comes the questions: what about that wild animal back there? What about the tunnels? Double back on your choices, and you’ll see where each segment connects in different ways. And each choice made is represented in a square on the lower part of the screen, allowing users to hop easily between timestamps. It’s definitely enjoyable the first time through, recalling that rush of thumbing the pages forward or backward in a paperback choose-your-own-adventure novel. But if you’re looking for action and a larger narrative, that stuff doesn’t grow on the mountainside on which You vs Wild: Out Cold takes place.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The interactive nature of You vs. Wild: Out Cold is an enjoyable novelty, a bit of streaming platform whimsy that’s sure to become more widespread. It also makes Out Cold a stone cold lock to entertain the kids at least one or two times through, until the choices are spent.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch You Vs. Wild: Out Cold on Netflix