free Survivor Weekly newsletter<\/a> to have all the latest news, interviews, and commentary sent right to your inbox.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n In the excerpt below, we see down-on-his-luck realty champion Kent making what he hopes will be his triumphant return to television. But hopes don\u2019t always turn into dreams. At least not good ones. Before you enjoy the excerpt, which shows Kent\u2019s arrival on his TV redemption tour, check out the official description for Escape!\n<\/p>\n
Kent Duvall, a faded reality show winner, just wants another chance at glory \u2014 to find his way out of his depressing life and back to his highlight reel. When a scandal is captured on camera at a charity event, he gets his shot, on a new jungle survival show with seven other contestants. Each of them has been cast as a type \u2014 Ruddy the bully, Miriam the nerd, Ashley the love interest \u2014 but everyone is more than they appear.<\/p>\n
The contestants\u2019 goals seem simple \u2014 survive the wild, build a raft, win treasure. But Beck Bermann, a reality producer who suffered her own public shaming, sees them as characters in her redemption arc.<\/p>\n
As the schemes and strategies spiral out, breakout camps sabotage each other and rival producers struggle to control the storyline. Soon the question becomes less about who will win than who will make it out in one piece.\n<\/p>\n
Cover for ‘Escape!’ novel by Stephen Fishbach.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Dutton<\/p>\n
Excerpt from Escape! by Stephen Fishbach <\/p>\n
As the bright yellow Zodiac shivers across the choppy waves, Kent\u2019s already thinking about how he\u2019ll describe it in his interviews. I was like an explorer, he\u2019ll say. Adventuring into an uncharted world. The island beckons to him, a tropical paradise, palm trees belly dancing at the edge of a white sand beach straight from a Corona ad. Two cameramen race up and down the shore, their rigs gripped against their shoulders. Two sound engineers balance their boom mikes on their heads. A drone swoops through the air. He feels like he\u2019s rocketing into a myth, like he\u2019s writing himself into the pages of Treasure Island. The spray is in his face. He shakes his machete into the sky and lets out a giant whoop, which is echoed by the scream of a red-and-green bird that flashes upward from the jungle.\n<\/p>\n
There are nine of them clutching the Zodiac\u2019s rubber edge, speeding toward the show. Eight contestants and Erika, a skinny producer with the look of a furious terrier glaring at them from a handbag. The boat\u2019s driver, a bearded maniac who reeks of body spray, whoops as he steers into the swells, launching them skyward and crashing back. Ashley\u2019s next to him, dolled up in a red wrap mini that\u2019s breathtakingly, spectacularly impractical for the outdoors. Across the boat, a young guy with thin lips and a sweater tied around his shoulders leans back and splays his legs. He looks like the asshole boyfriend from every teen movie. The older lady who was muttering to herself in casting is there. A nerd girl with Coke-bottle lenses pulls her lab coat close. The sexpot. The villain. The battle-ax. The nerd. And here\u2019s Kent Duvall. The alpha male.\n<\/p>\n
He never thought of himself as an archetype before his first season on Endure. He was Kent. He worked construction. He went out with the guys. Dated a bit, but never a ladies\u2019 man. He waited until he was eighteen to lose his virginity because he wanted to find the right girl. Kind of a screwup at times. He\u2019d once been detained by the police when he and some buddies drunkenly sprayed fire extinguishers across the thirty-third floor of a Vegas hotel. An average guy, he figured. Then fifteen years ago, he was walking through the hallways of the Kimpton Hotel Santa Monica, paired with two other broad-shouldered rough-handed men as they moved between meetings with casting associates and network execs. The three of them sat side by side outside hotel room doors waiting to be interviewed, forbidden from speaking, clearly competing for the same spot. They weren\u2019t the only group. Three leathery older women stalked through the halls. There were three nerds, in different varieties of nerdiness\u2014a skinny nerd with glasses, a chubby nerd with a Captain America T-shirt, and a biker with pierced eyebrows and a tattoo sleeve, who would gaze at Kent\u2019s trio with yearning every time they passed in the hallways, like somehow he got misfiled into the wrong group.\n<\/p>\n
At first Kent hated how quickly he\u2019d been reduced to a tick on a demographic survey. Like finding out you\u2019re a clone, you start to wonder which parts of yourself are authentically you and which parts have been mass-imprinted by the social machinery. The trio would use the hotel gym at the same time, each guy adding another couple of plates to the bench press when it was his turn. At some point the third guy wasn\u2019t there. Then Kent was the only one. He was the alpha male of alpha males. This morning, when Erika gave each contestant a single survival item, he got the machete.\n<\/p>\n
![\"Video](\"\")
<\/p>\n
He leaps off the boat before it even stops moving, holding the blade aloft like a flag. He\u2019s wearing a lavalier mike disguised as a beaded necklace\u2014they all are\u2014but the necklaces are supposedly waterproof, and the transmitters are in small waterproof pouches clipped to their underwear. Behind him the boat motors to a stop. The wind stills. The heat presses in, warping the air. The other contestants climb off the Zodiac and follow him toward shore. Kelly-Anne sashays up the beach in full-on vamp, like she\u2019s on a Sports Illustrated photo shoot. An older man, aggressively spray-tanned with a pronounced gut and dyed black hair that\u2019s swept backward along his neck, looks like he might be carried away by the tide. Carl roars again and again as he splashes in, like a children\u2019s toy with only one button.\n<\/p>\n
They gather on the shore and give each other excited hugs. The last one off the boat is the nerd. They all watch as she hesitates on the gunwale. \u201cYou can do it, Glasses!\u201d shouts Ashley. The girl takes a tentative step forward, stumbles, and face-plants into the waves. The group exchanges little looks. Kent can practically hear the clown music. \u201cI hope they let us vote people off,\u201d says the bro. Kent starts to laugh but glances quickly at the cameras. He doesn\u2019t want to be the bully.\n<\/p>\n
When the sopping girl has joined them on the beach, one of the producers separates from the huddle of production personnel. \u201cWelcome to Escape!,\u201d he says.\n<\/p>\n
Excerpted from Escape! by Stephen Fishbach, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Stephen Fishbach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes, real life is more dramatic than fiction. But only sometimes. Because the things that go down in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-236800","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Video](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Cubi3swn.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n