Discovery Channel is stripping survival back to the bone with its most brutal iteration yet. Naked and Afraid: Apocalypse drops twelve hardened survivalists into a man-made hellscape, forcing them to claw their way out with nothing but grit and instinct.
Premiering Sunday, July 27, 2025, at 8:00 PM ET/PT, the new series trades tropical jungles for scorched ruin. This time, there’s no extraction crew waiting. If they want out, they’ll have to find the way themselves.
Set in a remote South African wasteland, the eight-part series throws its contestants into abandoned locations laced with decay and danger: a ghost town, a junkyard, a cemetery, even a collapsing mine shaft. Everything is rusted, rigged, or ready to snap. Glass shards, twisted metal and poisoned water replace the usual jungle pests.
Wildlife is no less lethal. Elephants. Lions. Black mambas. The kind of apex predators that don’t flinch when the camera rolls. And unlike past seasons, survivalists won’t just need to hold out. They’ll need to move fast, covering ground and scavenging supplies as they navigate hostile terrain toward a vague idea of civilisation.
The franchise has never gone this far into nightmare territory. No fire starters. No tools. No food. No clothes. Not even a set extraction point. This is as raw as reality TV gets.
Produced by Renegade 83, LLC, a division of Lionsgate Alternative Television, the series is designed to pressure-test the franchise’s format in a high-stakes, post-collapse setting. For Discovery, it’s a calculated escalation that leans into its core demo’s appetite for unforgiving, no-safety-net survival storytelling.
Viewers familiar with the original formula will recognise the DNA, but Apocalypse isn’t recycling challenges. It’s detonating the old playbook.
