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"Mark Burnett&amp;amp;#x2019;s Expedition Africa is like that other show. Except this time the contestants, you know, might not survive\n\n[\n\n](http://blog.gq.com/images/.a/6a00d8341cc8d453ef011570acf481970b-pi.jpg)\n\nOn May 31st, reality TV creator Mark Burnett debuts his latest dirt, sweat, and tears franchise, Expedition Africa: Stanley and Livingstone, an eight-part History Channel series that follows four modern-day explorers as they retrace the 19th-century journey of American journalist Henry Stanley (of &amp;amp;#x201C;Mr. Livingstone, I presume&amp;amp;#x201D; fame). It&amp;amp;#x2019;s like Survivor\u2014minus the craft service table. We caught up with Burnett to find out, among other things, whether a hippo can kill a man.\u2014mark kirby\n\nOf all the expeditions in history, why re-create Stanley and Livingstone?\n\n Because it&amp;amp;#x2019;s an incredible story\u2014an American looking for a world-famous British explorer. Stanley wanted to show the British who&amp;amp;#x2019;s on top, and at the time\u2014the late 1800s\u2014nothing could&amp;amp;#x2019;ve be worse for the British than having an upstart American find their lost hero. And as far as vicarious adventure goes, Africa wins every time. There&amp;amp;#x2019;s a sense of danger all the time: whether from crocodiles when crossing rivers, poisonous snakes\u2014I think there are 29 different kinds\u2014lions, and hippos, which turned out to be quite a problem.\n\nHippos? They look so peaceful at the zoo. \n\n People don&amp;amp;#x2019;t realize how dangerous they are; I think there are as many river boating deaths from hippos as from crocodiles. They&amp;amp;#x2019;re incredibly territorial; shooting footage around African rivers, they&amp;amp;#x2019;re the thing you&amp;amp;#x2019;re most concerned about.\n\nSo are you outfitting the explorers with weaponry? I mean, how historically accurate is the show supposed to be?\n\n Well, of course, it couldn&amp;amp;#x2019;t be exactly like Stanley and Livingstone, but we wanted to remove things like GPS and give them the old style maps that Stanley would&amp;amp;#x2019;ve used, which required them to talk to villagers to get a sense of the route. It was really planning how much can you push through in a day\u2014where do you stop for the night, where can you get water or fuel for a fire? Water was also a big problem\u2014we weren&amp;amp;#x2019;t resupplying the explorers with it. They have to find their own water and boil it. But sometimes the water was so dirty at river&amp;amp;#x2019;s edge that they have to go out in a little dugout canoe to collect it, all the while seeing crocodiles surface and watch them. They were very, very nervous in those boats.\n\nThere&amp;amp;#x2019;s no &amp;amp;#x201C;voting off the island&amp;amp;#x201D; or boardroom meetings with Donald Trump here. It seems like a return to the lo-fi stuff you were doing at the beginning of your career, with the EcoChallenge races. \n\n When I was producing EcoChallenge in Morocco in 1998, I spent a lot of time with the Berber people who live in the Atlas mountains above Marrakech. Before the winter, they cross the peaks of the mountains to head for the Sahara, and then each summer they cross back. Everyone goes\u2014old people, young people, every family\u2014and you can imagine how hard that is. They have this very important saying: Choose your companions before the road. And whether it was Survivor or EcoChallenge, my storytelling has always been informed by reading about expeditions and realizing that it was never really the people who had the physical prowess or technical expertise who would be likely to succeed. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s really about character. How do you keep your ego in check when you feel like yelling at others? And that&amp;amp;#x2019;s the through-line for Expedition Africa: Four type-A, very-sure-of-themselves adventurers who had to work together.\n\nHow&amp;amp;#x2019;s that work out for them? Any Survivor-style catfights?\n\n One of things I&amp;amp;#x2019;ve learned over the years is that you cannot predict who will get along with whom until you get there. The most unlikely people rise to the top and are kind and human, and other people who you think seem to be kind and human turn out to be difficult. You don&amp;amp;#x2019;t know until you start walking.\n\nThere seems to be a greater appetite for this programming now than when EcoChallenge first aired. Survivor, for example, is about to begin filming its 19th season. Any chance you might revive the Eco franchise?\n\n My instinct says that there&amp;amp;#x2019;s a lot of negativity out there right now\u2014between people&amp;amp;#x2019;s jobs, their bank accounts, and their general fear for the planet as a whole. At those times, escapism is quite good. And so I do feel that there&amp;amp;#x2019;s an opportunity for me to do EcoChallenge again\u2014a lot of people have wanted me to do it. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s just a matter of me focusing and finding the right television partner. It&amp;amp;#x2019;s a good time for this kind of expedition, exploration, and vicarious adventure travel."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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