Survivorman vs. Bear Grylls?

I was wondering last night, while watching part of an episode of Man vs. Wild, who would have a better chance of actually surviving a real survival situation; Bear Grylls or Survivorman. I used to be a serious Man vs. Wild watcher. For a while, I was like one of those folks who watches WWF and is adamant that everything is real, and that those men in tights are really fighting each other. I thought Bear was really roughing it, and every episode was a close close call. It was always so suspenseful to watch and see whether he would make it or not. Would he become dehydrated, fall off a cliff, be eaten by a pack of hyenas? These were all serious possibilities in my mind. Somehow Bear always pulled through. I thought his kick ass survival skills were behind that, until I saw the episode where he had to float down a rocky whitewater river. Bear looked normal in the scene prior to floating down the whitewater, but then, in one camera angle, he seemed to have a very distinct square padding under his sweatshirt. Oh, surely Bear couldn't be wearing a life vest! I rewound and watched that scene in slo mo a few times, and there it was. Bear was a phony. He was wearing a life vest. This was months before his "survival scandal" broke and one of his crew members admitted that he often sleeps overnight in hotels, and has crew members helping him through the episodes, so I think I called it. I was disenchanted.

The next season, the Discovery channel started adding disclaimers before the show, alerting people that Bear sometimes has the crew helping him, and is "presented" with survival situations. Well, that was pretty lame to me. This season seemed to be all about him eating nasty stuff like bugs, larvae, various types of animal feces, and then describing the taste. Bear was trying to regain his kick ass-ness through eating. This was not going to work.

I then started to think back to all of the episodes of Survivorman I watched, waaaay before Bear came on the scene, and how I had compared Survivorman to Bear, and thought he was whiny and much less of a survivalist than Bear. I realized that Survivorman was probably bitching because he was actually putting himself in survival situations. Granted, he never whittled a boomerang out of a branch and then hunted rabbits with it, but he was actually out in the survivalist trenches, trying to do his thing, while Bear was probably sleeping on a Sealy Posturepedic. Survivorman would begin a task, like setting traps and then returning in a few hours to find he hadn't caught a thing and his bait was gone. Sure, he would then complain and give up, but at least he was (at least we now think) authentic. Bear is a phony. What do you think?