Longtime UDM Nursing professor Molly McClelland has always shared close bonds with her twin sister Polly.
Their latest adventure teamed the two of them up with McClelland’s daughter Bailey in a tense survival game.
This past summer, McClelland, Polly and Bailey, a 2024 graduate from Detroit Mercy’s PA program, spent the summer in the Canadian wilderness as contestants in FOX’s survival reality series, Extracted.
The first of 10 episodes airs Monday, Jan. 26, at 8 p.m. ET on FOX and streams the next day on Hulu.
The show produced by Sylvester Stallone pits 12 competitors attempting to survive in the wild with no training, no supplies and only two family members as lifelines. Alliances are formed and tensions mount as families negotiate and compete to send essential resources to their competitors. A $250,000 prize awaits the survivalist and family that outlasts everyone else.
Polly was one of the 12 “survivalists;” McClelland and Bailey were Polly’s lifelines back at “headquarters,” also in the Canadian wilderness.
McClelland watched the first season with her family and found out pretty quickly that she would be starring in the second installment.
“We’re all watching this show and at the end my sister Polly made a comment, ‘that would be fun to do,’” McClelland said. “She didn’t tell us she was applying for it until after she did.
“They contacted Polly back and said we’re interested in your team, so then she reached out to me and my daughter Bailey and said, ‘oh by the way I applied for us to be on this show and they like us.’ At that point, ‘it’s like here we go.’ We’re all gamers, and we always just try stuff.”
McClelland, Polly and Bailey began the journey with the show back in April with interviews and headed to the Toronto region in mid-August. After their team was selected as one of the final 12 for the show, they made their way to the wilderness for the beginning of filming.
“They put you in sequester before the show starts and during that period in our hotel room, we had no access to the outside world, no phones or computers. They brought our meals to us,” McClelland said. “Those nine days we still didn’t know if we were going to be selected as one of the final 12 teams. They did interviews with us. At the end, we were selected.”
The next day, McClelland and Bailey were separated from Polly and the show began. McClelland and Bailey arrived at their headquarters along with the 11 other teams.
“We arrived and nobody knew what we were doing. We had a desk assigned to us with a computer where we could see and hear the survivalists, but they couldn’t see or hear us,” McClelland said. “That’show it all started. It was quite the experience.”
The teams kept an eye on their survivalists, while also competing with the other teams at headquarters in different competitions.
“My daughter and I have a great relationship and we get along really well,” McClelland said. “Polly was on camera all of the time. There were times I was scared for her and times I was really proud of her.
“The show pitted the teams against each other, and it became really difficult, because it forced you to backstab each other. Some competitors were ruthless and cutthroat. Others couldn’t do it. Bailey and I had a hard time deliberately sabotaging other teams.”
McClelland, who teaches graduate and undergraduate Nursing courses, and Bailey were the only contestants on Extracted with medical experience (besides the show’s adequate medical personnel). McClelland said it came in handy several times.
“There were a couple of situations where people were looking to us for advice,” she said.
For McClelland’s sister, competing on the show was a chance to prove herself following a health scare.
“Polly’s the adventurous one,” McClelland said of her twin sister, who lives on a farm in Nebraska. “She’s outdoorsy, has climbed mountains all over the world.
“Three years ago, she found out she had stage 3 uterine cancer. She and Bailey were climbing the Grand Tetons and Polly started struggling, wasn’t able to summit to the top and she didn’t know it at the time, but she had cancer. Bailey was with her, so they have that bond.
“Polly went through the whole cancer journey. She’s a survivor. Part of this journey was that Polly wanted to prove to herself that cancer didn’t beat her, cancer didn’t win. She’s always been really physically fit and active and then she’s going through surgery and chemo, it really took her down. So, part of her desire was to show that cancer hasn’t beaten her.”
She can’t talk much about the show, since it hasn’t aired yet, but McClelland did say she is thankful to the many people who allowed her to take part in the show that took her away from the start of the 2025-26 school year, including College of Health Professions Dean Ahmed Radwan and other colleagues at the University.
And she’s also thankful that she competed on the show.
“I never envisioned myself doing this,” she said. “My sister Polly, yes. She’s wanted to do this for awhile. The nature of the show is three people and we like to try stuff. Polly said, ‘we are doing this.’
“The three of us have a really tight bond, but this really brought us close together.”