Mykel Hawke wears a MTM SEAL

In one Lost Survivors publicity still, Mykel Hawke kneels on a scuffed white float and hauls his soaked co-host out of the sea, a scuba tank and dry bags beside them. That is the show in a single frame. Travel Channel dropped Hawke and his wife and co-host, Ruth England, into undisclosed places in 2013 with almost no supplies, then filmed them working out where they were and how to get home. They did it in jungle and swamp, on a deserted Caribbean island, on a glacier. Hawke is a retired Green Beret, a former Special Forces captain with 24 years of service, and the kind of host who actually goes in the water.

MTM put two of its watches on him for the run, and the one made for the wettest work is the SEAL. It is a titanium dive watch rated to a thousand meters, with an automatic helium escape valve at ten o'clock, a sapphire crystal four and a half millimeters thick, and a 45mm case. Its markers and hands are lit by tritium gas tubes, the kind that glow on their own for about 25 years with no light to charge them. MTM still sells the SEAL in titanium, between 2,275 and 2,450 dollars.

Most of that is wasted on him. The helium valve exists for saturation divers decompressing for days in a pressurized bell, not for a man fording a swamp, and the thousand-meter rating is built for depths the show never gets near. The part that earns its place is the lume: tritium tubes that stay readable in mud, at night, or underwater, with nothing to switch on and nothing to charge. By MTM's own account, Hawke wore the SEAL and the AirStryk across the series. This is the SEAL.