Out of all of the shows on the 2024 TV schedule , The Summit might be the most fascinating that I'm watching in primetime. Seeing contestants being blindsided with the news they had to climb a mountain was thrilling enough, but as I watch many try and fail to make the trek, I begin to wonder about the larger questions. What would happen if someone dropped their share of the prize money off the mountain during a challenge? Executive Producer Kevin Lee was gracious enough to answer my many questions about The Summit , like how they chose the mountain and what would happen if someone dropped their prize money off a cliff.
As it turns out, the contestants aren't carrying tens of thousands of dollars in their backpacks after all, but they are carrying some cash: The bags of money, the outside [layer] of the money is real and then the inside is fake money. But, there are still thousands of dollars in each one of those bags. And so if they had dropped the bag, we would have sent someone down to get it because there's thousands of dollars in there.
While it's not a million, that’s a lot. Luckily, that didn't happen, but we did talk about it, and we're like, like what would happen? The insurance [company] and all of that have to take that into account. I think it will be dramatic if that ever happens.
The cash amount in each bag is not insubstantial, but it's certainly less than the original $62,000+ that each contestant was said to have in their backpack. At the same time, they're .