Naked and Afraid XL, which sees a dozen survivalists attempt to last 40 days with no food, shelter or, as the title suggests, clothing, begins on Discovery May 24. While Naked and Afraid features man-woman pairs working together, XL has 12 veterans of the show divided into teams of three. Weaker players can be cast out from their team.

Joe Boyle, Discovery senior VP of production and development, spoke with Multichannel News about what the naked aspect brings to the show, and why Naked and Afraid XL might be well suited for pandemic viewing. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: The contestants sometimes deal with jaguars, mountain lions, other dangerous wildlife. Are they protected in any way?

Joe Boyle: Yes. The safety of the survivalists is paramount. Even with everything we do to keep them safe, it’s dangerous at all times. Off-camera and not interacting with the cast, we have a medic tent. We have the ability to create quick evacuations if anything did go wrong. We work carefully with game wardens and local wildlife officials to make sure we don’t put either the humans or animals in a bad situation. I think we’ve done a really good job doing that. It doesn’t mean there’s no danger, it just means we’ve mitigated everything we can.

MCN: How much do you worry about the survivalists being injured?

JB: I worry about it every day. The scenario is extremely well thought out. The amount of safety protocols that go into building each and every episode is thorough. But you’re still in the wild. They are still making the choice as survivalists to put themselves naked with very little resources against the natural world. And it’s not just getting bit by a dangerous snake. It’s also starvation, it’s about nutrient loss, it’s about the mental side of it. All of it is very hard on them. We’ve been lucky so far.

MCN: What makes Naked and Afraid good viewing when we’re stuck in a pandemic?

JB: The people who are on Naked and Afraid have been sheltering in close confines long before the rest of us were. At the end of the day, what makes Naked and Afraid work is not that it’s a survival show. It’s in the survival genre, but the storytelling is really about the human spirit. It’s about people pushing themselves to overcome obstacles they never thought they could or weren’t sure they could. It’s got a lot of deeper layers to what the story is really about.

Survival is the setting for it, and primitive survival specifically. But human relationships — interacting with someone, working together to achieve a goal, pushing yourself to limits you never thought possible — those are really deep human stories to tell and Naked and Afraid tells them every week. That’s why people enjoy it. People can live vicariously through it but also see their own struggles within it.

MCN: What have you learned about people, about humankind, from working on the show?

JB: I learned there are more incredible people out in the world than I ever thought there were. At this point, we’ve had [around 300 survivalists] on the show. Every single one of them, even the ones that tap out, are heroic. They all have something about them that makes them very special. We work really hard not to let the casting of the show fall into just people who want to be on TV. We really want people who would do this regardless of the show.

MCN: What does the nakedness add to the show?

JB: Physically, you’re literally without anything. Clothing is shelter — it protects us from the environment. Our bodies don’t naturally have that. People have to recreate that in some way, creating shelter, creating clothes.

I wasn’t there in the very beginning stages of development, but there’s a story Nancy Daniels [Discovery chief brand officer] often tells about how the conversation revolved around, do they have shoes or do they not have shoes. There was a serious debate about, ‘How real do we allow this to be?’ If you ask the cast, they say it’s cheating — if you’re naked, you’re naked. If you want shoes, you make them. It was amazing, the amount of debates that took place just around the topic of shoes.

[Being naked] changes your mindset of how exposed you are and just how vulnerable you are. It’s a pretty drastic thing to go through, to feel that vulnerable the moment you enter the challenge and try to figure how you are going to overcome that. I think it works on all different levels.

From a television perspective, [naked] helps make for a great title. 

The made-for-TV couple from this season’s edition of The Bachelor — Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell — will be getting the hottest and most buzzworthy wedding gift that television can give: a spinoff series.

Their new series Ben and Lauren: Happily Ever After — premiering this fall on Freeform, sister cable network to The Bachelor’s home of ABC — will join a multitude of spinoffs from successful reality series franchises across the cable dial. In many cases, these off shoots perform as well or better than their parent shows in the ratings.

More than one-third of cable’s top 30 reality shows for the period of June 1, 2015, to May 31, 2016, were reality franchises and their respective extension shows, according to Nielsen. Such extensions, which can potentially cannibalize viewers from their parent series, were once considered a risky play for networks. Now, they are sought-after content with built-in brand recognition and an audience base that can be lured in without a great deal of marketing effort.

“Spinoffs are so big these days because it’s so hard to launch new series today … there’s so much content to choose from and it’s so hard to reach people with new ideas and a new series,” Shari Levine, executive vice president of production for Bravo, said. “When you are doing a spinoff you’re delivering a show to a ready-made viewer that’s somewhat susceptible. You don’t have to explain the concept to them. Half of the marketing is done for you.”

Related:'Deadliest Catch’ Hooks a Spinoff [subscription required]

For some cable franchises just one or two spinoff shows aren’t enough to satisfy the appetite of loyal viewers. Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise — which follows the lives of affluent housewives from various parts of the country — has branded a whopping nine separate series over the past decade.

GETTING HARDER TO ‘KEEP UP’

E! later this year will launch its limited reality series Rob & Chyna, focusing on the lives of celebrity couple Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna, another spinoff from the long-running series Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

VH1’s Love & Hip Hop, which chronicles the lives and relationships of hip hop and R&B musicians, has spawned three spinoff series: Love & Hip Hop: New York, Love & Hip Hop Atlanta and Love & Hip Hop Hollywood.

And the Atlanta version has spun off two series of its own, K Michelle: My Life and Stevie J & Joseline: Go Hollywood. And despite all the iterations from the original franchise, it seems viewers are singing the praises of virtually all of these series. Current seasons of Love & Hip Hop, Love & Hip Hop Atlanta and Love & Hip Hop Hollywood all finished among the top 15 most-watched reality series over the past year, according to Nielsen. The sixth season of parent franchise Love & Hip Hop averaged 3.3 million viewers (on a live-plus-7-day basis), topped only by the fourth season of Love & Hip Hop Atlanta, which drew 3.6 million viewers.

Brand recognition is paramount when trying to break through in crowded television marketplace, E! and Esquire Network president Adam Stotsky said. Once a brand is established with viewers, he said, the ability to extend it over a multitude of programs gives networks a leg up on the competition.

E!’s Kardashians empire remains strong and fertile, according to Stotsky. Flagship Keeping Up With the Kardashians is still among the most-watched shows on cable, averaging 2.9 million viewers over the past year, besting all of its franchise extensions, which include I Am Cait, Kim and Khloe Take the Hamptons and Dash Dolls, as well as new series Revenge Body With Khloe Kardashian, to launch later this year.

“Given that competitive landscape and the marketing challenges faced in launching new franchises and brands from scratch, working off an existing base where viewers know who these characters are and the world they live in is like makes for an easier entry point for consumers, and alleviates some marketing pressure for the networks,” Stotsky said.

Still, a franchise extension isn’t a slam dunk. Producers must still find a viable new setting, location or character around which to build a spinoff series.

“You have to listen to your audience because they vote with their thumbs on the remote controls everyday,” Stotsky added. “It’s a balancing act — on the one hand, the opportunity to extend versus the risk of cannibalization and oversaturation, and that’s something we monitor.”

Discovery Channel decided to bring back contestants from its popular survival-themed series Naked and Afraid, challenging them to endure a much longer and tougher survival challenge in the buff via sophomore spinoff series Naked and Afraid XL, Denise Contis, executive vice president of development and production for Discovery, said. The result was another hit series for the network, with Naked and Afraid XL garnering 3.8 million viewers during its freshman run, beating out its predecessor’s 2.7 million viewers.

“The spinoff is authentically motivated by the contestants themselves, who are looking to push themselves even further,” Joe Boyle, executive producer of both series, said. “Instead of just that process of learning to work with one other human being, they’re learning to survive and work with a number of other human beings and the ramifications of that. It gives us a much larger playing field in terms of character development.”

EXTENSIONS OF ANOTHER KIND

Other networks are doing more unconventional franchise extensions. AMC, which this July will debut the Stephen David-produced Making of the Mob: Chicago — a spinoff of last year’s Making of the Mob: New York — also looked to basic cable’s top-rated scripted series, zombie thriller The Walking Dead, to beget Talking Dead, the reality genre’s most-watched series over the past year. The live recap talk show, hosted by Chris Hardwick, drew 6.3 million viewers during the period, according to Nielsen.

TV One is doing the complete opposite of AMC: It’s spinning off an episode of Unsung, its unscripted docuseries on popular R&B artists, into an original telefilm. An Unsung episode on the 1990s R&B singer Miki Howard served as the basis for Love Under New Management: The Miki Howard Story. Its June 12 debut drew more than 2 million viewers across multiple viewings, setting a network ratings record for an original film, said D’Angela Proctor, head of original programming and production for the African-American-targeted TV One.

As long as networks are serving viewers with unique content that fits within the confines of a particular franchise, there’s no such thing as too many spinoff s, Bravo’s Levine said. Along with the Housewives franchise, Bravo has already built multiple shows around such franchises as Million Dollar Listing, Married to Medicine and Below Deck.

“As long as it’s working, there isn’t a limit, but I don’t think you know until you actually do it,” she said.