The rigging gloves are off and the bloodied, blistered flesh of the generation (and culture) wars are laid bare in The Bridge Australia, now streaming on Paramount+.
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In between all the cynical editing and fame factory fatuity, good reality TV uses its small platform to say something about the big stuff, and this beautiful-looking series filmed around the gloomy waters of Tasmania's Lake Pieman does a neat job of showing us what happens when one demographic is usurped by another.
A show exploiting our collective approach to unavoidable and abject toil - a group of people must work together to build a 330-metre water-spanning structure in 17 days - The Bridge Australia reflects with clinical pellucidity the dynamic at play right now across the country's angsty offices and warehouses and retail counters.
Yes, the millennials are firmly in charge and meek Gen-X has been made redundant (stop all the clocks, roll the eyes, press send on the passive-aggressive emails).
Even if we've never visited north-west Tassie (and based on the scenery, why the bloody hell haven't we?) we're still in familiar territory as this latest extrapolation of the Survivor genus musters a core group at a timber and iron weekender complete with wood-fired hot tub and drip-feeds the viewer just enough exposition for them to form irreversible prejudices about each and every one of the contestants.
The ages hover mostly around the 20s and well below the 40s and this millennial vibe quickly takes over proceedings with the ruthless efficiency of the fearful Sandmen in Logan's Run, a movie about a society in which people are culled once they reach the age of 30.
When, barely minutes into the first episode, a 28-year-old man finds himself with the power of elimination, his choice is telling, if not predictable.
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While he is urged by the group's leader to get rid of a garrulous 25-year-old, who, in less than a day, has earned a reputation for being lazy and divisive, his sights seem more set on an outspoken 40-year-old woman, who, in the same space of time, has proven to be industrious and hard-working.
No $250,000 prize for guessing which one gets the knife.
That's not to say all the old people have targets on their backs.
One 65-year-old seems to fly under the radar with aplomb but to appease his capricious overlords he must dress like a hobo and recite poetry on command. And you can't blame poor old "Bushie" for degrading himself like a clapped-out court jester, we geriatrics have learned to do whatever it takes to survive in the workplace.
Just a couple of years younger and holding a far more secure position on this show than Bushie, is Hugo Weaving, the celebrated actor who lends his considerable vocal talents to The Bridge Australia.
This coup is in keeping with the overall quality of the franchise (foreign versions have already screened), a mood maintained by Paramount's decision to utilise its streaming platform to air the show rather than roll it out among all the other riff-raff on its free-to-air reality TV repository, otherwise known as Channel 10.
Weaving certainly isn't phoning it in, his Mogadon-mode voiceover the perfect bridge between the action and the viewer. He seems especially prone to discussing the baleful nature of the beacon which blinks from a tower on the little island which the contestants must reach with their floating platform - surely an impossible task?
Weaving chides the contestants for ignoring the beacon - "Its heartbeat getting stronger," he says, with Bushie-esque poetic flourish.
Although red, and not green, it's hard not to liken the light on the island to the beacon on Daisy Buchanan's dock in The Great Gatsby, a well-worn symbol of desire and unattainability.
Spookily enough, in a moment of rare introspection, the same 25-year-old who was nominated for the boot early in the show for rubbing her co-contestants up the wrong way, reveals Fitzgerald's 1925 American classic to be her favourite book.
This is heartening and, considering the young woman only recently referred to a stack of timber as "hella heavy", a little surprising.
Disappointingly though, she seems to have missed the obvious link between the Lake Pieman beacon of The Bridge Australia and the Manhasset Bay beacon of The Great Gatsby.
Those smug Gen-Y producers probably edited it out.
