• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, December 8, 2014

If you really stopped and thought about it, you would have concluded long before Discovery’s “Eaten Alive” special aired last night that there was no way this naturalist would be “eaten alive” by a 27-foot anaconda.

I hinted as much in a blog post last week about this show, which Discovery “sold” as if this guy was really going to be consumed whole by this snake -- a giant green anaconda with a big appetite.

This did not happen, and viewers took to social media to complain that they’d been had. Well, how could this have really happened?  The only place this ludicrous “experiment” could ever be successfully accomplished would be in a cartoon -- with the ingested herpetologist forming a huge bulge in the snake’s midsection and then perhaps suddenly “unzipping” himself from captivity and emerging unharmed wearing his safari hat and a jaunty smile.

In reality, if this snake expert -- Paul Rosolie -- had been “eaten alive,” he would not have been “alive” for long. However, millions believed that this guy might actually be eaten alive on TV, so they tuned in to watch, only to find out that he was not eaten alive. It wasn’t even close.

Most of this two-hour special, which aired Sunday night on Discovery, was given over to Rosolie’s search for a giant anaconda that he would then tempt into eating him (perhaps by dousing the top of his head with salt and pepper -- sorry, another cartoon reference). 

Discovery’s press release last month announcing this show positioned Rosolie as a modern-day Ahab and a 27-foot anaconda as his white whale. “Rosolie was very close to capturing what he believed was the world’s largest anaconda, a 25 to 27-foot behemoth that slipped through his hands and nearly dragged him to the bottom of the floating forest. If Rosolie succeeds this time in capturing this giant beast, he’s going to attempt something no one has ever dared: to be EATEN ALIVE,” the press release said (the bold, all-caps treatment is Discovery’s).

He never captured the snake. So, in the final 20 minutes of the show, he was seen making his “eaten alive” attempt with an anaconda that was in captivity somewhere outside the Amazonian habitat where these elusive creatures live  At one point, this snake locked its jaws around Rosolie’s helmet. At another point, the snake nearly snapped one of Rosolie’s arms, or so it seemed.

As silly as it seems now in retrospect, viewers had every reason to believe they were going to see a guy get eaten alive. To begin with, the show was actually titled “Eaten Alive,” which is not at all an ambiguous title. And Discovery’s press release seemed to promise it too: “Rosolie’s goal was to persevere through the constriction and potential ingestion deep into the belly of the beast,” said the press release, referring to the taping of this show in the Amazonian jungle last August (it wasn’t “live”).

Note the words “potential” and “goal,” which seemed to leave some wriggle room for Discovery if too many people complained after the show that they’d been duped into watching a man get eaten alive by a snake, but then never got to see what they thought they had been promised.  Well, Discovery might say, “we said only that there was the ‘potential’ for this to happen. It was merely a 'goal,' but one that was not achieved, unfortunately.”

However, if this guy Rosolie is such an expert on these creatures, then he must have realized that he would never survive a whole-body ingestion “into the belly” of this thing. That would render his “goal” of being swallowed whole as completely outside the realm of possibility, and he probably knew it. 

While Discovery might not agree, the network is guilty of over-selling this show. Its announcement last month gave journalists and the public the clear impression that this naturalist would be eaten alive and swallowed whole -- as ridiculous as that might seem now.

“Dear Discovery Channel, you should have called #Eaten Alive ‘Hugged Alive’,” wrote one detractor on Twitter -- hashtag #EatenAlive -- where complaints were numerous.

“Geraldo shouldn’t feel as bad about Al Capone’s Vault this morning after last night’s #EatenAlive,” wrote another. 

It’s true: “Eaten Alive” was in the tradition of “Al Capone’s Vault” and any other ballyhooed entertainment that didn’t measure up to the pre-show hoopla.

“Discovery letting me think Paul gets eaten by a snake and then not letting that happen is the reason I have trust issues,” commented another Twitterer.

Trust issues? When you watch TV, that comes with the territory.