The Most Believable Reality TV Is Set on Mars

The astronauts arrived at the Mars base one by one, dressed in faded orange spacesuits. After they walked through a pressurized chamber and removed their helmets, they were blasted in the face with some sort of decontaminating mist. When the cyclist Lance Armstrong walked in, one of his comrades was in awe. “The fact that we have an astronaut is so crazy,” Ariel Winter, an actor who appeared on Modern Family, told another contestant, who was visibly confused. Winter had mistaken this Armstrong for Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who died in 2012.

So began the first season of , a Fox reality show that sent celebrities to “space” (the Australian desert), and whose season finale airs tonight. Over the course of 12 episodes, viewers have watched. The point of the show is for contestants to work together when things go wrong—a communication tower goes down, a robot dog needs to be rescued, the habitat’s precious garden catches fire. If the group decides you aren’t “mission critical,” you go home. The winner gets the prize of being declared “the brightest star in the galaxy.”