A nation’s reality shows do not arise from nowhere. In the late nineteen-nineties, one of the most popular programs on Russian television was “Intercept,” in which police officers chased and beat contestants who were trying to steal cars. The Greeks, post-crash, are obsessed with “Survivor.” The Norwegians tune in for real-time knitting and log fires, while, in Japan, contestants on “Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!!” (“This Is No Task for Kids!!”) endure the smelling of one another’s assholes. In the late spring of 2016, billboards appeared across Britain, advertising a show that would attempt to remake society altogether. Superimposed on landscapes that evoked an unruined world, slogans railed against the pointlessness and the cruelty of late-capitalist existence. “No poverty. No recessions. No bankers’ bonuses,” one poster, put up next to A.T.M.s, read. “No slavery. No cyber-bullying. No adults on microscooters,” read another, on the London Underground. A waterfall tumbled over a cliff at sunrise. Each poster asked the same question: “What if we could start again?”
The show was called “Eden,” and it was about to air on Channel 4, the edgiest of Britain’s five terrestrial TV channels. In 2000, Channel 4 ran the first British series of “Big Brother,” broadcasting reality television in a manner—for hours and hours a day—that had previously been reserved for royal occasions, test-match cricket, and international disasters. The channel had been looking for an equivalent hit since giving up the franchise, in 2010, and “Eden,” with a rumored budget of fifteen million pounds, was the next contender. A group of twenty-three skilled strangers would live in the wilderness, isolated from the world, for a year. “Eden” would be austere and searching. There would be no tasks, evictions, or prizes. The cast members would build their own shelters and hunt and grow their food while a small embedded crew and a rig of remote cameras observed every minute of the embryonic society. The project was the work of Keo Films, a production company that had never made a reality show. “It certainly set out to be a pure experience,” Ian Dunkley, who helped commission “Eden” for Channel 4, told me recently. “Genuinely, we did not know how it would pan out.”
“Eden” ’s timing was propitious. In the spring and summer of 2016, Britain was tense and introspective, contemplating the referendum on whether to leave the European Union. Channel 4’s posters trolled the nation’s lived experience. On the morning of the Brexit vote, “Eden” ads filled the newspapers: “No politics. No propaganda. No more not knowing.”
The first episode aired on July 18th last year. The gaunt landscapes were revealed to be the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, the westernmost point of the British mainland, in the Scottish Highlands. “If we could start again, what kind of world would we build?” the narrator asked, against footage of hills dense with Sitka spruce. “Would it be as divided and politically uncertain as the one we live in today?”
Onscreen, “Eden” was slow and sincere. Filming had started in late March, and the participants were figuring out how to farm and how to feed themselves. The program had a guileless quality, as if it wasn’t sure if it was a documentary or something more performative. The cast seemed undecided, too. They appeared torn about whether they should build a tepee and throw parties on the beach or dedicate more time to growing kale in the soaking Scottish soil. They more or less did both. The chef kissed the yoga teacher. The boatman, a self-styled adventurer, went to live in a toolshed. At the same time, a male clique discussed starving weaker members out of the group. During its initial run of four episodes, “Eden” ’s audience, which began with two million viewers, nearly halved. A Canadian life coach named Tara Zieleman gave up and returned to normal, fallen life, complaining of being bullied.
The show went off the air. The plan had been to broadcast four mini-seasons, documenting the community’s progress throughout the year. But “Eden” did not return. In October, its Twitter and Instagram feeds dried up. However, unlike other, not dissimilar reality shows (in 2014, Fox cancelled “Utopia,” a reported fifty-million-dollar project along the same lines, after two months), the makers of “Eden” persevered. The experiment went on.
Stories spread about the production. The British press reported that “Eden” was secretly in chaos: that the location was rife with midge swarms and unexploded bombs and that the cast had broken out, and had been seen roaming the countryside. In its mysterious, unwitnessed state, “Eden” and its lost reality stars seemed to offer a stronger parable for these narcissistic end-times than anything deliberately conceived. After filming finished, this past March, seven months after the show was last seen, NPR’s “Morning Edition” asked, “If a person lives in the forest and is not on TV, does she make a sound?” The fate of “Eden” and its participants made the news in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, and Slovakia. In Spain, newspapers called them “los olvidados del Edén”—the forgotten of Eden.
I entered Eden on a Friday morning a few weeks ago. The air was full of rain. Bog cotton stood on the reeds in a muddy bay, and there were concrete posts with the word “Water” on them driven into the moor. I walked around the edge of the bay for about half an hour before coming upon a path that sloped up into woodland and arrived at a clearing. During the Second World War, the Ardnamurchan Peninsula was requisitioned for military training, and the northern coastline was used for live-fire rehearsals of the D Day landings. Five months after filming ceased, the show’s location looked as though it had been the scene of a small but tidy war. There was a dark-blue shipping container and the outlines of eight small modular buildings, where a crew of around a dozen had spent the year collecting footage and audio from the other side of a six-foot-high wooden fence. The fence sealed Eden on two sides. The rest faced the open sea and the islands of Rum and Eigg. I followed the fence until I came to a gate hanging open, and went inside.
In the fall of 2014, a pair of location scouts turned up at the office of William Kelly, the manager of the Ardnamurchan Estate, which covers much of the peninsula, and asked about shooting a TV show there. “The estate is mainly horizontal and vertical bog,” Kelly told me. “We said, ‘Yeah, fill your boots.’ ” The site that Keo and Channel 4 settled on was a six-hundred-acre headland on Ardnamurchan’s northeastern side. What Eden lacked in extreme remoteness—in places there were houses only a few hundred yards away—it made up for in telegenics: spectacular dunes, ominous forest, and a broad, sandy beach. It had wood for fuel and shelter, mackerel in the spring, and deer in the fall.
Donald Houston, the landowner and Kelly’s boss, wasn’t much fussed either way. “I don’t watch a huge amount of this reality bullshit on the television,” Houston told me. When we met, the laird of Ardnamurchan was eating a meat pie at his desk. Houston owns two castles, half a whiskey distillery, and around twenty-five hundred sheep. Occasionally, he asked if anyone had seen his deerhounds. Houston noted that archeologists believed that, in the Bronze Age, the bay near Eden had sustained a community of around a thousand people. “O.K., life expectancy was maybe thirty-five in those days,” he said. He rented out the woods for one pound.
For the next year, Kelly and the other estate workers accompanied TV executives who came up from London to work out the logistics of the show. Dunkley, from Channel 4, lost a boot in the mud. “It is my idea of hell,” he said. “I need central heating.” Veterans from other reality shoots were struck by the extreme conditions. “We sat round the table going, This could either be great, or it is going to be ‘Lord of the Flies,’ ” Mick Bass, who oversaw the installation of the camera rig, told me.
Keo paid for the national electricity grid to be extended a mile into the forest. A risk assessment for “Eden,” compiled in November, 2015, warned of the dangers of fire, trench foot, hypothermia, and “persons becoming aggressive and acting violent due to the stresses of living wild.” Kelly and Houston watched the preparations for the show with bemusement and awe. The ground at the “Eden” site was too poor to grow crops, so a helicopter flew in a hundred tons of topsoil. “Farmers around here would give their left testicle for ground like that,” Houston said. But they weren’t fool enough to camp out in the rain for a year. “We thought they were fully mental,” Kelly said. “We couldn’t believe anyone would be fucking stupid enough to volunteer.”
Inside the gate, the path into Eden led up through the trees. At first, it was heavily scored with tire tracks, from the off-road vehicles that brought in the show’s forty-six cameras, the power lines, and twenty-two kilometres of fibre-optic cable. At the peak of the headland, the path gave out. I stumbled downhill for a while, tripping on roots, until I noticed a small opening among the trees and three large heaps of cut wood. Some of the longer pieces had nails in them, with fragments of tarp attached. There were other domestic touches: a small bridge over a stream, a rough door, the suggestion of a chair. I leaned down to touch something of the palest green, which turned out to be the skeleton of a sheep.
I set off to find the beach where the “Eden” community lived during the summer months, but soon got lost. Steep valleys of ferns led nowhere. The rain had stopped, but I was soaking. When I finally emerged onto the dunes, clouds hung on the hills like smoke. The only remains of the “Eden” camp were some old fire pits and more bones. A young buzzard hovered for a long time, and then sped away. I picked my way along the shore, falling once or twice in the seaweed, before I found a hole in the fence and clambered out. The first person I met was a woman in a blue anorak walking her dog. I asked if she knew what the enclosure was for. “Aye,” she said. “That reality show.” She cocked her ear to the silence of the forest. “Are they still in there?”
Around two thousand people applied to join “Eden.” The producers placed notices on military forums, Christian environmentalist Web sites, and Facebook pages popular with doctors who volunteered overseas. “Do you want to start a new life?” the ads began. Robert Jackson, an apprentice electrician from Preston, in Lancashire, saw one in the Daily Star, a raunchy tabloid, on a construction site.
The show sought applicants with “an enthusiasm to not only survive but thrive in an area rich in natural resources but very little else.” Jackson had recently returned from the Himalayas, where he had spent time in an off-grid community. “It was just gorgeous,” he told me. Back in Britain, he was struck by the isolation of people’s lives. Another volunteer, Glenn Moores, had been an I.T. contractor when, at the age of twenty-seven, he discerned a future of mortgage payments and ennui. “I thought, I still have a chance to not go down this route,” he said. He retrained as a deer hunter. Now in his mid-thirties, he e-mailed Keo Films without expecting to hear anything. They called him back in fifteen minutes.
“We put them together based on skill,” Liz Foley, the series’ editor, told me. Some abilities were harder to source than others. Robert Pattinson, a veterinarian, was signed up six days before shooting began. In late March, 2016, the twenty-three cast members were taken individually to hotels in the Highlands and checked in under fake names. They were allowed to bring a single large backpack and their “tools of the trade.”
On the morning of March 23rd, all the participants went through one of Eden’s gates, wearing microphones, GoPro cameras, and G.P.S. Man Down packs, to monitor their heart rates and trace them if they got lost. Moores taped twelve bottles of whiskey to the outside of his pack; Jackson forgot to bring waterproof boots. “I fell into the bogs real heavy,” he told me. He was relieved when he saw the group’s small flock of goats, chickens, pigs, and sheep. “I was, like, Thank God,” he said. “I expected to be eating bark.” It rained heavily the first night, and the men and women of “Eden,” who barely knew one another’s names, slept huddled under tarps.
While the estate workers and the producers were preparing the site, they often found themselves congregating in a sheltered clearing behind the dunes, not far from the sea. They left the cast’s initial supplies there—rations for a hundred days, seeds and plants to grow, and the toolshed—and rigged the cameras to film it. After a few days, the group chose to build a camp there. Watching the footage from the outside, the production team was elated. Foley spent the opening weeks of the shoot grinning. “A lot,” she told me. “Thinking, Look at them. Look at what they are achieving. This is going to work.”
Jackson was also excited by Eden’s potential. There were doctors, paramedics, an Army captain, a shepherdess, a fisherman, and a carpenter. The boatman, Anton Wright, had rowed the length of the Amazon. “I remember thinking, How lucky are we to have this group of people?” Jackson said. Others were more skeptical. Andrew Whitelock, known as Titch, a plumber from Yorkshire who had taught survival courses, noted how few supplies many of the participants had brought with them. “People had come in with backpacks with bugger-all in it,” he said. “I was, like, What kind of thing are we doing? It just seemed to me, people came into this underprepared.”
The volunteers also quickly became conscious that they had different attitudes to being on TV. Wright had previously applied to be on “Big Brother,” but others, like Josie Hall, a late addition to the cast, who had previously worked in a fair-trade supermarket, did not own a television. The camera-shy searched for places in Eden where they could disappear, and take off their microphone packs for a few hours. But a loudspeaker system rigged in the trees, known as the Voice of God, would tell them to put them back on again. On day six, Hall wrote in her diary, “I’m trying to believe in this community, and to trust in Keo (because otherwise, what can I do?). But did they really choose people to make this work? . . . TV is weird. I don’t know if I can get past that.”
A few of the cast members with specific tasks soon got a sense of how hard life in Eden was going to be. The group’s gardener, Rachel Butterworth, lost weeks of the planting season preparing the soil and transporting a heap of compost half a mile across the headland. Pattinson, the vet, had nowhere to gather the sheep. After surveying the dense forest, Moores, the deer hunter, realized that there would be nothing to shoot until July: “I just looked around and thought, How the hell am I going to do this?” The group decided to eke out their initial rations over the entire twelve months and entrusted them to the Army captain. “People kind of panicked,” Pattinson recalled.
Hunger stalked the first months in Eden. There were moments when it seemed as though the experiment was working: there was a rota system for jobs around the camp, and a few weeks when the mackerel came in. But, surviving on meagre bowls of potatoes or barley, the participants soon fractured between those who felt that they were carrying the community and those who felt dominated as a result. A crude hierarchy formed, based mainly on physical strength. “You could see that some people were yearning to take control of things,” Jackson said. Group meetings did not go well. Hall, who had written a short book about communal living, asked each member of Eden to write down a vision for the community. No one bothered. “I kept hearing the word ‘mindful’ quite a lot,” Titch, the plumber, told me. “A lot of hippie-dippie stuff.”
Only a few residents of Ardnamurchan had any sense of what was going on behind the fence. David John Cameron, whose family has lived on the peninsula for hundreds of years, worked on the show as a production assistant. Like most local people, the Camerons survived on tourism and small-scale farming. It was Cameron’s job to mail hard copies of the footage to London. On his days off, he grew vegetables and chopped wood. He would stop by the production room and watch the group dithering and bickering. “It drove me insane, watching twelve of them have a meeting about how to dig a furrow,” Cameron said. “Just get on and dig it. You can see the clouds coming. Get on with it.”
On the other side of the bay, Andrew and Margaret Green, a part-time accountant and his wife, would hear the group swearing as they adapted to their new life. “They were out of their depth,” Andrew Green said. The couple had been alarmed by the idea of the show as soon as they had heard about it. “We wanted the right people to come here, not the wrong people,” Margaret Green told me. “Dutch people used to come every year.”
In London, the producers at Channel 4 received a daily log of what was happening on the show. “I don’t think we realized until early summer quite how dark it was going to get,” Dunkley told me. After weeks of growing tension, Titch suggested at a group meeting that the men of Eden should do “manly” jobs, like fishing, and the women should do “womanly” jobs, like washing dishes. Watching the feed, Foley was taken aback. “It was, like, O.K., this could be interesting,” she said. The chore system fell apart and the initial split within the community hardened. Some of the men suggested padlocking the ration barrel, to prevent stealing. Ali Blatcher, one of the doctors in the cast, was reading “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” by Yuval Noah Harari, and she came across a passage about how men controlled access to food and tools in hunter-gatherer communities a hundred thousand years ago. “I was seeing that play out right in front of my eyes,” she said.
The group’s cook, a garrulous chef from Sunderland named Stephen Etherington, had come to Eden because he wanted his own TV show. He skipped most of the meetings. “People took themselves pretty fucking seriously,” he told me, rolling his eyes. Etherington had brought in sourdough starter and one-kilo jars of cumin and coriander. Whenever he could, he would corral one of the embedded crew members to film his knife work and talk through the day’s potato recipe in the kitchen. At the end of the day, Etherington would replay what he had done, wondering which bits would make the edit. In the production room, Cameron, the runner, found Etherington’s cooking-show reel hilarious. “You are in there for a year, mate,” he said. “You need to calm it.”
The early interactions between the producers and the community were firm. The cast members were allowed to leave letters with their microphone packs, which were recharged every day. But when Pattinson asked for materials with which to build a sheep pen, or Butterworth asked for nets to keep butterflies off the plants, they were rebuffed. “They said, ‘We are not your minders,’ ” Butterworth recalled. Eden was supposed to be cut off and self-reliant. “If you respond, you are creating that environment where they can ask, and they are relying on you,” Foley said.
But the rejections irked the participants, especially as they began to suspect that not everybody was abiding by “Eden” ’s rules of isolation and non-interference from the outside world. The fence ran next to a public footpath, and some of the cast would chat with walkers going past, and ask for snacks. There were rumors of illicit drop-offs of chocolate and cigarettes. When Zieleman, the life coach, walked out of Eden, in late May, part of the reason was the cheating. “That killed the integrity of the whole thing,” she told me. In June, the group’s yoga teacher, Jasmine Comber, tried to leave twice, but the producers persuaded her to return. Comber was one of the youngest people in Eden, blond, and making out with the chef. The crew allowed her to call her father before returning to the woods. “We all wanted to speak to our families,” Hall wrote in her journal. “How could Keo do this to us?”
By early July, with “Eden” still a few weeks from broadcast, five people had left the show. On July 7th, Foley went back to London, taking her first weekend off since the start of the shoot. That night, Moores, the deer hunter, and an outdoorsman named Tom Wah decided to quit as well. Wah thought he would have a kayak on the show, and was missing his girlfriend. Moores had lost sixty pounds and was fed up. “It was all going to tits,” he said.
It was raining when the men reached the gate. Two junior members of the production team were on duty. They drove Moores and Wah to Glenborrodale Castle, the crew’s headquarters, where they ate venison pie and drank beer. The next day, Foley and Moores spoke several times on the phone. “I said, ‘Look at what you have put me into,’ ” Moores recalled. “ ‘Look at this carnage.’ ” He was told that the community needed him for their winter meat supply. “They twisted my arm to go back in,” he said. Foley remembered the exchange differently. “It was very, very apparent that he regretted it,” she told me. “Hugely.”
In the afternoon, Moores went back to Eden. Foley was conscious of the risk of being seen to meddle with the community. “It would be producing it,” she said, “and the concept of this is that we are not producing it.” When the rest of the cast saw Moores, they became angry. He was a divisive figure, and some had been delighted when he and Wah left, because their absence had weakened the emerging all-male faction. More broadly, though, the remaining participants believed that, if people could come and go from Eden as they pleased, the show was going to hell. “I was furious he was there,” Jackson said. He cast about for a suitable analogy. “If I sign a mobile-phone contract, I expect the mobile phone I signed for,” he said. “I signed for a certain set of rules.”
By early evening, Eden was in rebellion. The cast covered cameras and took off their microphones. They put their hands together as one and swore an oath to escape and drink in the nearest pub, which was about six miles away, although no one was quite sure where. In all, fifteen of “Eden” ’s seventeen remaining participants joined the protest. (One was in the hospital with a broken finger; Wright spent the evening whittling oars.) “We wanted to revolt,” Jackson said. “We wanted to not bend from lies.”
The men and women of “Eden” made it about three miles before a crew member handed them a cell phone. It was Foley, calling from London. She warned them that they were about to destroy the program. “I just reminded people, ‘This is not what you want to do,’ ” she recalled. The group turned back, and the gate closed behind them. The first episode of “Eden” aired ten days later.
The walkout happened on a Friday night. When Cameron arrived for work on Monday morning, he sensed that a fundamental dynamic within Eden had changed. “If it was a train, it was on a junction,” he told me. “It didn’t keep going the way it was envisioned from that point on.” In the following days, the cast members demanded that people who left not be readmitted without a community vote. They also started asking for things that would make their lives easier. They were given cement and a chimney flue. Etherington and Titch, who had grown close, asked for a monthly delivery of twenty-five kilograms of sugar and fast-acting yeast. Previously, it had taken the group up to a month to brew alcohol, which they had flavored with nettles and pinecones. But the “turbo yeast” took only forty-eight hours and could make a forty-proof moonshine. “You just put sugar, yeast, and water,” Titch said. “Boom.”
Each request posed a dilemma for Foley. “It is the hardest producing I have ever done,” she said. If the crew said no, they risked another protest and hours of wasted footage. “That is all they talked about, so then you can’t use that,” Foley told me. Channel 4 signed off on each concession. In London, Dunkley came to view the struggle between the cast and their observers as part of the experiment. When I asked if he was afraid that the volunteers would destroy “Eden,” he replied, “Yes, it was a fear. And I think that was part of the joy of the commission.”
Inside Eden, the new conditions were bewildering. After months of hardship, the sudden gifts only accentuated the power of those behind the cameras and the artificial nature of the construct. “You are being manipulated,” Moores said. Butterworth, the gardener, was distraught. “I had gone in there to be cut off from the outside world,” she said. Butterworth works in food education, and she worried about how “Eden” would be televised. “People were spooning white sugar into their mouths, because we were starving,” she told me. She lost her motivation. The garden, in which Butterworth had managed to grow a stunted harvest, was soon consumed with weeds. During August, she thought she was having a breakdown. She imagined that she was in Eden permanently, and that if she tried to leave she would be caught by the police and brought back. “I totally believed it,” she said. “That is how ill we all got in there.” On August 16th, she climbed the fence and walked away.
The beauty and the rawness of Eden were still overwhelming. Pattinson, the vet, had grown up on a hill farm in Northumberland and often loved his days on the headland. “It was just good,” he said. “Wake up when the sun came up. Get a fire going. Boil your kettle. Make your tea. Feed the hens, feed the goats, check the eggs.” Pattinson was in a relationship with Katie Tunn, an artist and a marine conservationist, who often clashed with the more boorish men in the cast. Using fallen trees and stones, she and Pattinson built an aerie looking out over the bay and called it the Rabbit Hole. Deeper in the woods, five men lived together and called themselves the Valley Boys. They felled trees to make cabins, shot deer, and talked crap all day. Etherington’s house, which he shared with Titch, had running water from a nearby stream. “I found a man inside me that I didn’t know existed,” Etherington told me. “An absolute primal beast.”
Eden came to feel increasingly lawless. Wright struggled to integrate with the rest of the cast. “It was the most horrific thing I have ever lived through,” he told me. “I started getting called a cunt every single day.” He and the group’s carpenter, Raphael Meade, lived together. As the discipline of the show eroded, Wright took planks from the Eden fence to build furniture. One night, he broke into the crew’s electrical shed and stole a chair, which he turned into a toilet seat. “It became Anton versus production,” he told me. Wright befriended a man living in a cottage across the bay. He snuck out to get drunk, dodging the flashlights of the production team on his way back.
“In the autumn, they did nothing but drink, really,” Cameron said. One boozy afternoon ended in a physical confrontation between Wright and other members of the cast. A few days later, the group decided to vote on whether to expel him and Meade. “There were people fearful of a violent backlash from Anton,” said Moores, who slept with a hammer under his pillow. “He was unstable at that point.” When the two men were narrowly voted out, they pulled down their house and burned it.
Arguments became constant. “I would love to say that people got something from the isolation, but basically it just turned fucking ugly,” Etherington said. Margaret Green, living across the water, found that she could no longer do the ironing in her front room. She used to work as a police dispatcher and recognized the anguish as real. “It would all of a sudden go quiet,” she said. “And you were, like, What’s happened?” Over time, the factions that had formed in the early months of “Eden” crystallized into two communities: the Valley Boys and everyone else. Jackson, who lived in the mixed group, wondered if they had failed. In October, the cast learned that the second series of “Eden” had not been broadcast.
Boredom became a factor. To kill time, Titch and Etherington would walk the dunes looking for unexploded shells from the war. (Bomb-disposal squads were sent to Eden seven times.) No one was sure who was sticking to the rules, or receiving favors from production. A rumor spread that there was a mobile phone among the group, and that some people were in touch with their families. Information always had a strange currency inside Eden. The cast learned of Brexit and Trump’s election from passing walkers but did not know if the news was true. To hide their knowledge from the cameras, they passed notes inside books. One day, Etherington opened a novel and found out that Prince had died.
The cast members also relentlessly exchanged rumors about one another. In November, the group decided to split their rations, deepening the divide between the two factions. A story spread that the Valley Boys, who had been experimenting with an all-meat diet, were intending to slaughter all the animals in Eden. Pattinson, the vet, cracked. On December 7th, he waited until darkness fell and then scrambled over the fence and ran into the woods. He walked for nine miles in the rain before he came to a holiday cottage. He found a key under a stone and slept on the floor. “I was so pleased to be free,” he said. The next morning, an estate worker picked him up hitchhiking near Ockle, in the north of Ardnamurchan. Kelly, the estate manager, phoned the production office. “We have found one of your escapees,” he said.
In a memoir of Brook Farm, a utopian community that briefly thrived in Massachusetts in the eighteen-forties, John Thomas Codman recalled the group’s final days. “It was like a knotted skein slowly unraveling,” he wrote. “It was as the ice becomes water, and runs silently away.” After Pattinson left, there were ten in Eden. In the Highland midwinter, it was dark sixteen hours a day. Hall spent much of the time reading. “Quite often we would joke, We can’t believe people are watching this,” she said. For Christmas, the groups made presents for each other, and smuggled in rum and fairy lights, but the day ended in a fight. The communities counted down the last hundred days, and on March 20th this year, twelve months after they entered Eden, the remaining cast members left in pairs, filmed by drones as they walked out through the gate.
They were taken to Glenborrodale Castle, where they were shown a newsreel of the year that they had missed. Jackson found it overwhelming. “Like, the terror in people’s faces,” he said. Etherington was drinking a pint of white wine. “I always felt like the world was moving forward,” he said. “I was, like, How have we backtracked?” Hall, who is mixed race, was scared. When Moores saw that Britain and the United States had split more or less fifty-fifty over both Brexit and Trump, he wondered whether the division within Eden had expressed something fundamental about the way that humans live together. “It seems to me just a natural number,” he told me. “It is binary. You are either in one camp or the other. It is us and them. Things tribalize.”
The survivors spent three days at the castle, resting and talking to a psychologist. It was odd to walk on carpet and to sleep in a bed. Etherington and Titch, who had spent virtually every day together in Eden, caught themselves introducing themselves to each other. There was no airdate for the remaining episodes of the show, so the cast drifted back to their old lives. Pattinson resumed his work as a vet. Jackson went back to working on construction sites in Lancashire. Moores returned to I.T. contracting. Those who had aspirations of TV work wondered how they were coming across in the edit. Etherington drafted some pilots for cooking shows and went to meetings at production companies.
The British press noticed that the year was up, and the story went around the world of a reality show in the wilderness which had been cancelled without its participants knowing. The cast knew that this wasn’t true. It was their first taste of the narratives that were beginning to form around “Eden”—about its delayed broadcast, and about their behavior in the woods. Kelly Webb-Lamb, the head of factual entertainment at Channel 4, told me that part of the reason it took so long for the rest of “Eden” to appear was to give the participants a chance to explain themselves. “When we started to see some of the darker, more uncomfortable things, it felt like the right thing to do to let them come out and be able to reflect and talk about that,” she said. In the spring, the participants were invited to London and interviewed individually on camera.
In late July, Channel 4 announced that the final eight months of the experiment would be broadcast over five nights in August, as “Eden: Paradise Lost.” The rebranding made some of the cast feel that the premise of the series had shifted, and that it would be more like a conventional reality show. “When was it ever going to be paradise, guys?” Moores asked. The group was invited to Keo’s offices for an advance screening of the first new episode. I met Etherington earlier in the day. He was trying to be upbeat. He still hoped that a chance might come his way. But he also wished that the final edit would acknowledge the show’s experimental nature, and the fallibility of its makers, as well as of the people who were its guinea pigs. “What you should really do is just come out and say, ‘Do you know what? We couldn’t do it. Because it went so mental,’ ” he said. “ ‘We are really sorry. We fucked up. Here it is.’ ”
The broadcasts began on Monday, August 7th. Wright had reserved the back room of a pub in Cambridge, where he lives on a narrowboat. A local reporter filmed the event on his phone. As the room filled with friends, Wright called out, “I want to apologize in advance!” The opening titles of “Eden: Paradise Lost” were heavy on flames. Much of the first episode centered on Wright’s alienation from the group. While he was giving a soliloquy onscreen about stealing apricots, he checked his phone to see the reaction on social media. One viewer, @IronManMode, tweeted, “I do hope this ends with Anton being flayed alive and eaten while the rest of the team dance around wearing masks made out of his skin.”
Pattinson and Tunn watched the shows together in Northumberland. The new episodes included the walkout, and some of the contraband that the group smuggled in, but mostly elided the role of the producers. “It is hard to watch, because you know that so much happened that they can’t put on,” Tunn said. On the Wednesday, Etherington flew to Bali to get away from it all. We spoke before he left for the airport. “I just hope that people can use their fucking brains and work out that is not exactly how it was,” he said. “That is not exactly how it fucking was.”
Just under nine hundred thousand people tuned in to watch “Eden: Paradise Lost.” The audience ebbed in the course of the week. As the show ended, images of the men and women of Eden faded away against the bogs of Ardnamurchan. The show aired almost exactly a year after Butterworth, the gardener, left Eden. She watched the first two episodes, until her departure, and then stopped, because it was too upsetting. “It was bringing back feelings from a year ago which I have been working to get over,” she told me. “They didn’t know what it was like to be in there. It still haunts us. It is not something that just ends as soon as you climb over the fence.” ♦
