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Ten reality TV contestants spent a year in the wilderness, only for their show to be axed.

If you could go back in time and forget about Trump winning the election, Brexit being an actual thing, or Haramabe dying only to be re-incarnated as a viral meme, would you?

If your answer is yes, this one’s for you.

A group of reality TV contestants in the UK have spent the last year in the wilderness, far from our Trump-laden world that battled through a tumultuous 2016. The dream, eh?

Except, it wasn’t such a great welcome home for the stars of the much-hyped reality TV show Eden. Not only were the contestants faced with the stark reality of our world upon re-entering it, but they also came to realise the show they had given a year of their lives to had been axed seven months earlier.

Eden, a show that was billed as a social experiment where “23 men and women try to build a new life and new society from scratch, isolated from the rest of the world”, was axed in the middle of last year after only four episodes.

However, it didn’t take long for 13 of the contestants to drop out after fighting each other, extreme bouts of hunger and “sexual jealously”. The last 10 contestants remained in isolation in a stretch of land in the Scottish Highlands only to re-enter society this week.

Image: Eden.
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Upon being asked why the network did not inform contestants the show had been cancelled, Channel 4 released a statement saying it was, again, all part of the social experiment.

"The appeal of Eden is that it was a real experiment and when filming began we had no idea what the results would be and how those taking part would react to being isolated for months in a remote part of the British Isles. That’s why we did it and the story of their time, including the highs and the lows, will be shown later this year."

According to the Huffington Post, the show was cancelled after viewership dropped from 1.7 million watchers to 800,000 within the span of those four episodes.

What part of 2016 do you wish you missed?

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