Nine two-person teams, a whole hog to break down, four proteins on a rolling schedule and no rest. Pitmasters premiered in July.
Most televised barbecue is a tasting show with a clock bolted on. Pitmasters, which premiered on Food Network in July, is built around the logistics instead: nine two-person teams breaking down a whole hog and then cooking and serving four essential proteins on a nonstop rolling schedule, for up to $50,000.
History ran a world championship in the Arctic. Discovery ran a forty-day showdown between countries. Neither was a coincidence.
History's thirteenth season of Alone put ten survivalists from seven countries into the Beaufort Delta and crowned a world champion. Discovery's answer, Naked and Afraid: Global Showdown, premiered April 1 and paired survivalists from Brazil, Australia, Mexico and the United States in a forty-day primitive bushcraft competition for what the network called the largest cash prize in franchise history.
Season four put ten Australians into Sapmi, in northern Finland, chasing $250,000 through a subarctic winter.
The Australian edition premiered its fourth season on SBS on July 15 and is still running weekly. For the first time the show left the Southern Hemisphere entirely, trading Tasmania and Fiordland for the far north of Sapmi, the Indigenous Sami homeland in Finland, and a Northern Hemisphere winter of deep snow, frozen lakes and subzero cold.
Ninety days in the Beaufort Delta, nine rivals gone, and a $500,000 prize that ends the strangest season the show has run.
The thirteenth season of History's Alone closed on September 9 with a title the series had never handed out before. Ziga Ogorelec of Slovenia lasted 90 days by himself above the Arctic Circle, outlasted every other competitor, and walked away with $500,000 and the first world champion designation in the franchise.
Luke Nichols still is not posting. His subscriber count kept climbing anyway, and his son has started filming his own trips.
Luke Nichols shut down Outdoor Boys in May 2025 with a farewell video, citing the attention his family was drawing as the channel grew. It had about 15 million subscribers at the time. It has more than 20 million now, without him posting regularly.