By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2012
In March 2012, one of cable’s most bankable adventurers and his home network had a very public falling-out.
Then
FishbowlLA, citing reporting in The Hollywood Reporter, noted that the coming season of Man vs. Wild looked likely to be its last on the Discovery Channel. Discovery had severed its ties with Bear Grylls, the survival-show star, after he allegedly failed to complete two projects he was contracted to deliver.
“Due to a continuing contractual dispute with Bear Grylls, Discovery has terminated all current productions with him,” a Discovery spokesperson told THR. Grylls’ management had no immediate comment. FishbowlLA noted, drily, that the part-time Malibu resident — who also kept a home on a private island in Wales — would probably be spending more time in Malibu while the fallout settled.
Now
The rupture did not define his career. Within a few years Bear Grylls had built an even larger franchise across networks and streaming — including Running Wild with Bear Grylls, which dropped celebrities and public figures into the wilderness, along with interactive survival specials and a steady run of new formats.
The 2012 split is a useful reminder of how unsentimental the reality-television business can be, even with its biggest names. A star can be terminated by press release one year and headline a network’s slate again a few years later. For Grylls, the contractual dispute was a setback; it was not, as it briefly appeared, the end.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.