Bear Grylls has Failed. He Admits it.

A few years ago, I flew to Fiji to interview Bear Grylls. It was 2019 and Amazon was resurrecting Eco-Challenge, the famously brutal adventure race created by Mark Burnett of Survivor fame. This wasn’t some cheap reality show being knocked together in the jungle.

There were 66 teams from 30 countries, 330 competitors, five helicopters, more than 200 cameras and a 674 km course across some of the beautifully brutal terrain Fiji could provide. Produced by reality TV mastermind Mark Burnett, the series deployed a 700-person crew, including camera operators who had summited Mt. Everest. Bear was hosting. Amazon was throwing serious money at it.

When I got my 10 minutes with Bear we talked about courage, resilience and what happens to some people when face with adversity. It was pure Bear, and made a good story.

At the end, as his minder gave me the wrap-up, I asked how he personally faced failure. His face lit up. He talked about it like it was a close friend. How to learn from it; how to survive it. It was excellent quote, social media gold, but it didn’t make the story, because, well, everyone thought/hoped this was the next huge successful juggernaut, and not a failure. I flew home, I put him on the cover(below) and helped promote it, And then the show came out.

And then it disappeared. The World’s Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji lasted one season. Reviews were good, mostly, with a few critics pointing out that Bear’s effusive style did not sit well with a serious race and that Burnett could not help Survivor-ing it, with accusations of creative editing to make a storyline. Regardless, it sits and 7.6/10 on IMDB.

I hadn’t thought much about that until recently, when I heard Bear talking about his failures on an old post. He said he’d once made a list for his sons of all the television shows he’d done that had failed or been cancelled. There were about 30 of them. Against four or five that really worked. And this list does not include his books, adventure gear or workouts, some working better than others. They are:

#	Year	Show	What it was
1	2005	Escape to the Legion	Four-part Channel 4 series following Bear and 11 recruits through a condensed version of French Foreign Legion training.
2	2006–11	Born Survivor: Bear Grylls / Man vs. Wild / Ultimate Survival	His breakthrough survival series. The same programme was sold under different titles around the world and ran for seven seasons.
3	2010	Worst-Case Scenario	Discovery series in which Bear demonstrated how to survive disasters, accidents and urban emergencies.
4	2011–14	Bear’s Wild Weekends	Celebrity adventure specials featuring Jonathan Ross, Miranda Hart and Stephen Fry. Some later editions repackaged earlier celebrity expeditions.
5	2012	Bear Grylls’ How to Stay Alive	One-hour survival documentary collecting practical lessons from Bear’s earlier expeditions.
6	2013	Get Out Alive with Bear Grylls	NBC competition series in which ten teams attempted to survive an expedition through New Zealand.
7	2013–14	Bear Grylls: Escape from Hell	Bear reconstructed true stories of ordinary people surviving avalanches, deserts, mountains and other disasters.
8	2014–19	The Island with Bear Grylls	Channel 4 survival experiment that abandoned ordinary people on an uninhabited island. It became one of his longest-running formats.
9	2014–23; 2026	Running Wild with Bear Grylls	Celebrity expeditions originally shown on NBC and National Geographic. Later seasons used The Challenge subtitle; its 2026 Fox incarnation is titled Bear Grylls Is Running Wild.
10	2014	Bear Grylls: Extreme Survival Caught on Camera	Bear presented footage of real escapes, accidents and near-death experiences caught on camera.
11	2014	Bear Grylls: Man vs. Everest	Documentary special about extraordinary attempts, records and disasters on Mount Everest.
12	2014	Bear Grylls: Everest After the Avalanche	Special examining Everest disasters and the climbers who survived them.
13	2015	Bear Grylls: Breaking Point	Bear took people with severe phobias into the wilderness to confront their fears.
14	2015	The Island — US version	NBC adaptation of the Channel 4 format, created and executive-produced by Bear.
15	2015–16	Bear Grylls: Mission Survive	ITV celebrity survival competition that ran for two series before being cancelled.
16	2015	Survivor Games with Bear Grylls	Chinese adventure competition featuring celebrities from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
17	2015	Britain’s Biggest Adventures with Bear Grylls	Three-part ITV series exploring the landscapes and natural history of Wales, Yorkshire and Scotland.
18	2016–17	Bear Grylls Survival School	Children’s series in which young participants surrendered their devices and learned wilderness skills over two weeks.
19	2016–18	Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls	Celebrity spin-off of The Island, produced for Channel 4’s Stand Up to Cancer campaign.
20	2017–18	Absolute Wild with Bear Grylls	Chinese series in which prominent businesspeople and celebrities faced wilderness challenges with Bear.
21	2017–20	Bear’s Mission With…	ITV celebrity specials featuring Anthony Joshua, Warwick Davis, Gareth Southgate and Rob Brydon.
22	2018	Bear Grylls: Face the Wild	Facebook Watch series in which Bear took members of the public into the wilderness and heard their personal stories.
23	2018	Bear vs. Shark	Discovery Shark Week special testing survival techniques around sharks.
24	2019	Hostile Planet	National Geographic natural-history series hosted and narrated by Bear.
25	2019	Treasure Island with Bear Grylls	A variation of The Island in which participants searched for money hidden across the island.
26	2019–22	You vs. Wild	Netflix’s interactive survival franchise. It also produced Animals on the Loose, Out Cold and Ranveer vs. Wild.
27	2019–21	Man vs. Wild: India Special / Into the Wild with Bear Grylls	Indian celebrity specials featuring Narendra Modi, Rajinikanth, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn and others.
28	2020	World’s Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji	Amazon Prime revival of the expedition race, hosted by Bear and contested by 66 international teams.
29	2021	Bear Grylls Wild Adventure	Two ITV specials in which Bear took Jonny Wilkinson and Nicola Adams on separate expeditions.
30	2023	Bear Grylls Meets President Zelenskyy	Channel 4 documentary following Bear into wartime Ukraine to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukrainian civilians.
31	2023	I Survived Bear Grylls	Eight-part TBS competition series co-hosted by Bear and comedian Jordan Conley.
32	2025	Celebrity Bear Hunt	Netflix competition in which Bear tracked celebrities through the Costa Rican jungle.
33	2025	Jesus: Refugee, Renegade, Redeemer with Bear Grylls	Six-part documentary series following Bear through Israel as he retraced the life and journeys of Jesus.
34	2025	Miracle	Faith-based documentary series hosted by Bear and built around reported modern miracles.
35	2026	Bear Grylls: Wild Reckoning	BBC series combining outdoor challenges with mediation and relationship repair.

Long list, isn’t it?

Bear Grylls, one of the most recognisable television personalities on the planet, has failed at television roughly six times for every big success. And I’d apparently flown halfway across the Pacific to watch one of them in the making, literally.

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We Only Remember the Ones That Worked

That’s the trick success plays on us. Mention Bear Grylls and you think Man vs. Wild. You think Running Wild. You think Everest, Obama in Alaska, drinking his own piss, giving himself an enema and whatever unfortunate animal he was climbing inside or eating that week.

You don’t think about the dozens of programmes that were commissioned, promoted, broadcast and quietly disappeared. I certainly didn’t.

Even standing in Fiji surrounded by helicopters, camera crews, elite athletes and Mr TV himself, Mark Burnett, it never occurred to me that I might be watching a failure in real time. The imagery was stunning. Watching Bear leap from helicopter was compelling and the atheletic challenge the contestants went through was awesome. It looked exactly like success. Good TV. Survivor with balls.

That’s worth remembering, because we usually see successful people’s lives backwards. Once somebody makes it, everything that came before starts looking like part of a plan. It wasn’t.

Maybe Failure isn’t Particularly Profound

There’s an entire industry devoted to finding meaning in failure. Failure teaches us, supposedly makings us stronger, so people persist as if persistence itself will manifest success. Sometimes, perhaps. But often failure is just failure, despite all the ingredients.

Eco-Challenge was spectacular. It had an extraordinary cast, enormous production values, a legendary producer, a global platform and Bear bloody Grylls. And it still didn’t get a second season.

That’s strangely reassuring. You can work hard. You can be good at what you do. You can have experience, money, contacts and a decent idea. And sometimes the bastard still doesn’t work. The mistake is assuming that tells you something profound about yourself. It simply tells you that approach did not succeed. Move on.

Bear Grylls Does Quit

This is the bit I think we get wrong about people like Grylls. His mantra is famously “never give up”. Except he does. All the time. Those 30 failed television shows aren’t still being dragged around the networks while Bear insists everyone try harder.

They’re dead. He moved on and that’s a much more useful definition of persistence or “never giving up”. You don’t have to keep doing something that isn’t working. You don’t have to save every business, project, job, relationship or stupid idea simply because you’ve invested time in it. Sometimes quitting is exactly what allows you to try the next thing. And occasionally the next thing is stupendously successful, like Man vs. Wild. Bear Grylls is a failure. A remarkably successful one.