Having conquered the realms of home appliance, LG – the brand that makes your TVs and washing machines – has now decided to try its hand at creating actual ‘home entertainment’ rather than just the device you watch it on, by creating its own reality TV show, Estate of Survival.
The ‘LG Original Series’ depicts eight contestants trapped in an opulent estate, only to find that the house is completely empty, devoid of beds, appliances, etc. Competing for a $100k prize (AED 367k), they must tackle high-stakes challenges that test their resourcefulness while navigating rivalries and tense eliminations. Predictably, each week will see another contestant’s elimination, concluding with one lucky winner.
The series is not merely a reality show in the typical sense to which we are used, i.e., watching stranded people reduced to their barbaric, Lord of The Flies instincts, shouting and/or kissing each other while we, the home viewer, laugh and ridicule from the refuge of our home sofa. Oh no, this new series will introduce viewers to a range of sophisticated LG home appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, air purifiers and more. So, really, it’s an advertisement masquerading as a reality show, a conflation of the two most nefarious vessels of consumption: buy this, laugh at them.
It’s no secret advertisers have little to no respect for the human body, viewing them as nothing but an algorithmic statistic prone to trends and herd mentality, and this new vague attempt at home entertainment is either the death of a genre, or the genesis of something new. Estate of Survival is available on Amazon Prime and LG Channels, the latter of which I have never heard, and whose existence alone feels very bemusing. But then again, Amazon started out as a “store”, and now they have an entire portion of their platform dedicated to original content. Same with Apple. So perhaps one shouldn’t ask the question, “Why does LG have its own streaming channel?” but rather, “Why doesn’t every brand have its own streaming channel?”
Don’t be surprised if McDonald’s starts its own streaming service in the near future, debuting with a reality show where contestants are trapped on an island scavenging for Big Macs. The stakes? If you find the lone Whopper, Ronald McDonald removes you from the island and throws you into the sun.
