‘The Interception’: the Russian reality TV show that let contestants become criminals
Reality TV has become a strange and unwieldy beast, one that’s continually spawning fresh and increasingly strange tentacles. However, few will ever be able to hold a candle to a short-lived Russian series that seemingly decided that O.J. Simpson’s infamous police pursuit was a sound basis for a show/ They were proven entirely correct when The Interception averaged 60million viewers a week at its peak.
The concept was simple but also fairly convoluted and potentially dangerous. Contestants were handed the keys to a brand new car, which they were allowed to keep if they successfully managed to evade the authorities for 35 minutes. A GPS locator was placed in the vehicle to up the difficulty level, the pursuers were real police officers, and the action unfolded on the streets of Moscow.
Ironically, The Interception was created so that the Main Directorate of Traffic Safety could paint themselves in a positive light. Carjacking was on the rise in Russia, so some genius decided that the best way to discourage automotive theft was to not only make it look extremely cool on a TV show watched by tens of millions but also paint the police as the erstwhile villains of the piece.
It failed to lower the spate of carjackings and had the inadvertent knock-on effect of making the cops look incompetent when they were defeated by a civilian driving a car containing a device that made their location readily available and easy to track. Unsurprisingly, The Interception ended up canned after just 14 episodes.
Despite being illegal in practice, not to mention stacked in favour of the police when they had six cars to track a solitary perpetrator, the show adhered to the strictest letter of the law. If traffic rules were violated, the contestant had to stop for 60 seconds, and any flagrant breaking of the rules prompted a shutdown in filming and expulsion for the offender.
It sounds fun to partake in but also very tricky to pull off successfully. However, a number of ingenious methods were devised by the small number of winners, one of whom drove onto a railroad car right before it departed the station, which is staggeringly effective in its simplicity.
On another occasion, a driver escaped onto a raft and let it drift out into the middle of a lake so they couldn’t be caught, which backfired when it ended up tipping over and sending the car sinking to the briny depths. One contestant thought painting their getaway vehicle a completely different colour would be enough to fool the cops, seemingly forgetting about the whole GPS thing that revealed their whereabouts.
Not everyone was completely clued in on The Interception, though, with a patrol car that wasn’t even part of the show mistaking the high-speed chase for a very real crime in progress, causing them to unwittingly get involved in an episode of one of Russia’s biggest episodic hits. Funnily enough, the format hasn’t been repurposed and replicated around the world for obvious reasons, but it was a wild ride while it lasted.
