Survivor is my favorite TV show. I’ve watched every season of the American TV franchise, Australian Survivor, Survivor South Africa and even the discontinued Survivor New Zealand.
Recently the American version has reinvented itself, and the distance between it and its international fellows is quite far.
This post is a post mortem on the American version of the show, although for comparative anatomy I may at times refer to its international variants.
Season 41 marked the beginning of NEW SURVIVOR and the demise of the old. It is “drop the 4, keep the 1”
Table of Contents
MICROCOSMICAL
Jeff Probst, host and producer, boasts that the intricacies of the social interactions on the island are a microcosm of society.
This is true, but he neglects to mention that there is another microcosm of society that the producers, the producers producers, the show’s advertisers, the TV station owners and shareholders, inhabit.
This corporate microcosm of society ensemble are in total control of the levers of the show and their directives cascade down. At the very end of this chain are the viewers, and just above this last rung are the castaways, they are the subordinates of subordinates of subordinates.
This asymmetrical power gives the producers the ability to concoct a self-sealing ecosystem.
REALITY TV’NESS
We can’t do forensics on Survivor without an examination of the environment.
Reality TV, including the burlesque’ness of The View and its ilk, demonstrate and role play proper middle class etiquette.
All media have mandates to inculcate and instrumentalize behavior. This post is about what Survivor is inculcating and instrumentalizing, and how it can be observed through the prism of Survivor.
THE AUDIENCE STRATIFIED
Lower class
Advertisers: budget priced cell phone services, lawyers inquiring “have you been wronged?” soliciting lawsuits to be prosecuted.
A reality of reality, is that the lower class is silo’ed, infrequently interacting outside of its enclave and the middle and upper classes want to be immunized from anything resembling the genuine life of the lower class.
Instead, the media presents palatably coiffed and attired proxies for the lower class who can persuasively evoke the experiences we must believe that the lower class monolith has. This amalgamation of proxies is bestowed media credibility and an unassailable authority. If you speak with an Spanish’y type of accent, no matter how Charo embellished it, it is the greatest proof there is. Middle class etiquette dictates that we do not challenge the credibility or intentions of the proxies, nor any conflicts of interest. Like cubicle’d employees the come into television’s conference room and make their presentation with a well rehearsed script.
The viewer has no ability to interrogate the authenticity of the lower class proxy, there is no reciprocity in the relationship. And, even if some moderated interlocutory was allowed, the middle class has an etiquette that must foremost be obliged.
Middle Class
Advertisers: pharmaceuticals, mid-end luxury cars, and premium hygiene products, etc.,
Constituents of the middle class are particularly vulnerable to how they are perceived by their peers, and more so by how they are perceived by those who possess more economic and social capital.
The NEW SURVIVOR is a microcosm of a society being torn by centrifugal force and the elites imposing stricter middle class etiquette that opens lanes to channel rage horizontally rather than vertically.
Upper class
Advertisers: pharmaceuticals and cars are, but the target audience is better captured with a different media product and experiential marketing. Reality TV is not scripted for the upper class because they are uninhabited by middle class constraints and not bound so rigidly to an ‘microcosm of society’ imaginary morality.
MINIMUM VIABLE GOOD AMERICAN
Americans had disagreed about what ‘good citizenship’ is. Some ideological expressions focus on rights, others emphasize a shared history. Computationally it is a very complex problem that has been unsolved.
To complexify it further, if you’ve calculated what “good citizenship” is, you must then establish what citizens should be ‘required to do’, to believe, or express.
What is the Minimum Viable Good American’? Finally, perhaps unfortunately, we now have some computational, minimalistic but profound “good citizenship” algorithm.
This expresses itself in NEW SURVIVOR. We have the Minimum Viable Good Survivor Castaway.
OLD SURVIVOR
Ye olden days of Survivor allowed the castaways more creative room to express themselves as individuals within a class, to be spectacular in uniqueness.
Castaways could be some broadly scoped ‘good American’, and yet a detestable person, for example is a castaway could be racist, but with enough fluidity to have tokens of redeeming qualities. The narrative arc of those castaways was ‘can they learn from their proximity to unfamiliar cultures, people, circumstances, ethnicities, religions, nationalities?’
The interplay of characters allowed us to see offensive people distantly yet with enough emotional entanglement so that we can have sensitivity to how we may, ourselves, be perceived and therefore self-correct, “I believe I am not like this person, but am I?”
Producers had cast some poor(er) people who talked about the prize money and how they would spend it. They had an ambition to gain social and economic capital by virtue rather than the categorization and assignation of bureaucracy quotas that overwhelm the show today.
This concept of virtue is interesting. In the era of OLD SURVIVOR, “virtue” meant standing out by distinguishing oneself.
But just like in our ‘new’ Survivor, in our ‘new’ America, “virtue” has been redefined to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actions based on what can be expected and measured. Virtue now means conformity.
None of this should suggest that the OLD SURVIVOR was without substantive flaws which is largely let out of this post. The show certainly needed to change, my post is about what it has changed into.
NEW SURVIVOR
CASTING
As part of the casting process the applicants are categorized and scored by some properties of their character, ‘friendly and bubbly’, ‘will have good laughable funny moments’, ‘will have difficulty blending into an alliance’ ‘first round vote out’ ‘racist traits’ ‘will cause intra-tribal conflict’ ‘wants to be a leader’ and so on and so on.
The interview process is exhaustive so as to have some certainty that the castaways will act as expected and as performed by them in casting. Producers fear ‘what if they are on the island, cameras rolling and freeze up, or don’t act consistent with how they acted in the interview process’.
In this way producers and casting agents need to have predictability to each castaways ‘dossier’, this is reality, but it is also TV.
Reality is free. TV isn’t.
Bad casting
The producers are casting bad, because they are bad producers.
The show is a microcosm of them also. They are casting boring mechanized bots because they are boring mechanized bots.
They are casting ‘superfans’, not because they are good at the game, in fact in large part they are charming, but unimaginative players.
Perhaps, in some alternative ‘microcosm of society’ such as the OLD SURVIVOR they would be good players. But, in this microcosm they are crap.
A season is 13 episodes, about 40 minutes each. From there we deduct time spent in tribals, time spent in reward and immunity challenges. From there we divide screen time devoted to smatterings of each player.
Every tv second is precious and carefully curated by the producers. 30 seconds on ‘this’ is 30 seconds less on ‘that’.
This exploits the ‘producer’s hidden advantage’ devising a pluralistic and unmanageable People Operating System in which the producers possess omnipotence.
New archetypes have been formulated.
Gay archetype
In previous seasons of the OLD SURVIVOR, the gay archetype, the ‘microcosm of society’ were:
- Spencer was a closeted gay, worried about being discovered and its consequences to his game
- Colton was the disagreeable, funny bitchy gay
- Richard Hatch was the openly gay but ‘just like us’ gay
In The NEW SURVIVOR, a gay character is amplified to the point of distortion, this applies to all the archetypes now deployed.
An LGBTQIA+ castaway must now be seen, heard and mimed. They need to wear the uniforms of gay, the gestures of gay, and an effeminacy that serves as their exclamation mark.
They can be smart, charming, charismatic, and so on, but these are all secondary or tertiary priorities to their profound ‘queerity’.
If the castaway cannot on first inspection be perceived as gay, the producers edit their thousands of hours of total footage, elevating that part of their identity.
Like the other archetypes I list, a gay person can be ‘good’ at the game but the producers have created mechanisms that narrow their opportunities to be ‘good at the game’.
Commensurately, they have vastly increased the opportunities and rewards for being seen as a gay person, they will get more confessionals, more screen time in those ‘gay to gay’ intimate chats about coming out of the closet or how they are ‘shunned by family’.
In totality the viewer will have an always-on awareness of the ‘otherness.’ We are like ‘them’, but they are not like ‘us’.’ We are therefore put into the role of students in their remedial level classroom.
Wanna see some proof, it’s crazy.
This is a recent podcast, the host and a guest. Under what imaginary happenstance are they’s pronouns relevant? It’s YouTube, there is no spontaneous interaction between the viewer and the guest, so wassup with that?
Immigrant archetype
Season 41’s winner Erica, we see and hear repeatedly, came from an immigrant family that settled in Canada when she was young.
Despite the fact that more than 20% of the population of Canada are immigrants, including the kids she sat next to in school, the retail workers she transacts with, medical, university staff, the professional environment and in all those hundreds of discrete moments we have every day, Erica feels like an outsider.
The point is not that Erica’s experiences have been traumatic or she suffered some cruel injustice and keeps a scrapbook of microaggressions she has endured, the point is that in this ‘microcosm of society’ she must have suffered such things and her enlightenment is that she realizes such a thing. This makes her a qualified proxy for the lower class immigrant experience.
Her pitch was excellent, but how could it not be? Having done nothing in the game but stand idly by, and doing confessionals about ‘little old me’” she had accumulated no hard feelings from the other castaways.
Had she shown up on the island on the 25th day she still would have won. The fact that she happened to have played the preceding 25 days was just icing on the cake.
Black archetype
There has always been Black presence on the show. Nuclear scientists, advanced degrees, law enforcement agents, retired military, small business owners, models, whatever it is, the show had ‘em.
This is not to say that casting was kind. Many Black, gay, minority and etc, castaways in the ‘OLD SURVIVOR’ were cast to be the ‘bad person’, ‘street thug’ ‘disliked’ or ‘ridiculed’.
Producers, themselves a ‘microcosm of society’ have co-opted the Black identity, just as there is now an algorithmic ‘good American,‘ there is also a ‘good Black person‘.’ They must be an ‘activist’.
Season 41 used this reality storyboard by having the Black castaways repeatedly reminding us that they are doing this ‘for the culture‘, which they all said with as much determination as Carson practicing his Survivor puzzles.
These are the proxies for lower class blacks. Why didn’t the producers cast the source material?
Mariann and Drea show
In season 41 there was a tribal council which heavily featured Drea and Mariann.
They come into a special tribal council and see that a black person has been voted out in the minutes immediately before they came in.
Drea is shocked, we see this in her eyes and demeanor. This acts as a cue to Mariann who sees the opportunities to coequally respond, I’m sure with some genuineness, but also to weaponize emotions to her advantage as she had said in an earlier episode confessional that she does this by crying, here we see it employed in another context.
This display prompts Jeff Probst to amplify the ‘social microcosm’ness of Survivor and ‘what’s going through your minds when you see another Black person voted out’.
Drea says what she says, no doubt with some authenticity, perhaps too much, but also as a technique to sustain herself in the game. According to the plan that had been hatched, she was going to be voted out in this tribal. Well, now she couldn’t because this is a bespoke ‘social justice microcosmical society’. There must be a remedy to this middle class etiquette violation of voting out a Black person and now having another one in tv show peril.
Mariann, although not a target, spends her idol in some Pythonesque display of solidarity.
Drea’s Unreal reality
Later on in the season Drea is voted out and lo and behold, unseen to viewers, because our survivor ‘microcosm of society’ has curtains, she is uncovered as a racist and treats Omer with all the cruelty and unfairness that she claimed for herself and her ‘people’ in her activist call to action in the tribal council.
So concerned were the producers to preserve this artificial ‘microcosm of society‘ that they demanded that Rob Has A Podcast edit out Omer discussing his encounters with Drea, fandom Survivor Reddit posts that mentioned it were compelled to be deleted, all gone.
This too is “a microcosm of society”, reality manipulation.
White archetype
White people serve as the proxy for all of Whiteness that will encounter an awakening to the plights of ‘the other’ and become an “ally.”
The suburban white Karen’y mother archetype is a New Survivor mainstay. This is not to say that this wasn’t a regular dossier used before, but now they must have that climactic introspection of her Whiteness’.
Ah, Gabler
Most damaging to the integrity of the reincarnation of Survivor is that the season winner of season 43, Gabler, is white, male, cisgender.
How dare the jury vote for the White male cisgender player who has done little, over the White female cisgender player who has done even less than that?
The jury pushed the envelope by stupidly not voting for the gameplay inferior player that they all seemed to dislike.
Producers scientifically reverse engineer to an optimal outcome, and this wasn’t it.
To resolve these opportunities for unsanctioned winners the producers have to rework their winner formulas even more. This was a learning lesson for them and going forward a few seasons, adjustments will have to be made.
The podcast clique was outraged, how could the woman who did nothing, not be the winner? Making it worse is that the podcast clique didn’t have the usual website show leaks that inform, well before the season airs, the boot sequence and season winner.
IDOLS AND ADVANTAGES
One grievance that worked its way into the show was that idols were too hard to find and that this disadvantaged women.
This was dubiously proven by complainants by the ever-clever use of statistics. One reason they offered for the shortfall of females finding idols centered around women are ‘home bodies’, nurturers, that they stayed by camp to prepare food in the traditional female role.
Accepting this theory, producers devised methods to dispense idols and advantages with di minimis effort.
This accomplished another desired outcome, anonymizing castaways.
The work effort of finding an idol is what had distinguished players, this has almost been entirely evaporated. Idol and advantage attainment is not achieved by a player, it’s allocated by producers.
Here’s some examples:
Knowledge is power?
In the old, deceased incarnation of the show contestants were nudged to make familiar exhortations such as “on survivor knowledge is power”. This helped to give the show a brand, but what is its brand now?
In its reincarnation, “knowledge isn’t power“, in fact it is such not a power – that the producers had to create an advantage called “knowledge is power“. Knowledge is now a low cost commodity. How do you know a player has an advantage or idol that can be repossessed with the ‘knowledge is power’ advantage? The producers through their story boarding of the season make sure that such information is almost all the time known to all.
Puzzles?
Puzzles are now recycled, the same ones, with the same solutions are used, this allows a person to study in advance. This is just as much of an advantage as an idol, and here it rewards the privilege of having the discretionary time to practice over and over again, hundreds of times. Here they are given two advantages
- Advantage to practice a challenge in advance of a challenge
- Advantage when winning, gaining the immunity
Of the people who have been permitted to cheat in this permitted way, all were White and came from the middle class.
Why does Survivor do this when it’s packaged itself as devoted to promoting a ‘microcosm of society’ that fosters equity?
Turn back time
In this advantage the team that wins a challenge is flipped around so they are the losers. Is this also a microcosm of real society?
Do or die
In a tribal a player has to select for three boxes, one of which will give them immunity in the tribal.
This was so clearly manipulated to nudge a player to choose a box in the producer’s favor that it was discontinued.
Shit in the dark
At a tribal, if a player feels they may be voted out, they now have an option, when going to vote, they can instead choose to shit in the dark. A doorway opens up and its completely dark inside.
The room is about the size of a small bedroom and the player has to squat down and shit. Then the light turns on and if the crap landed on the bullseye they have immunity for that and the person who gets the 2nd most votes is outta the game.
This has happened about 5 times and two of those times someone got immunity! It’s very exciting! :/
CHALLENGES
These are not ‘survivor’ challenges, they are company team building exercises staffed with a cadre of Human Resource specialists, psychiatrists and so on and so on.
Of course this is not a bad thing in itself, castaways do go thru emotional mayhem as they vote out friends, have to lie etc, but this corporate bureaucracy is utilized to partition viewers from castaways. If this is a “social experiment” then we are not seeing it.
CONFESSIONALS
Another grievance that former players expressed, amplified by the podcast cliques, and the joys of funny ‘statistics,’ was that players didn’t get enough airtime and ‘confessionals’.
There is certainly more distribution of confessionals now amongst the castaways – but the confessionals aren’t about their own game play – because there are so few people and plays that affect their game linearly.
Producers have prescribed viewers an overdose of confessionals about childhood traumas, sicknesses, parents that have passed, how they’re playing the game to be inspirational for all the ‘weird kids’, ‘for the nerds out there’ ‘for black kids at home watching this’, ‘to let handicapped kids know they can do anything they put their minds too’, ‘for all the gay and queer kids out there to be brave’ and so on and so on.
These are wondrous things and admirable, but it has nothing to do with the winner being awarded $1 million dollars.
Players on the first day should just each make a pitch and by sundown have picked a winner.
What do you do with players that only nominally exist within the game?
Erica, season 41’s winner didn’t get many confessionals or air time, because she did nothing. If she had done some ‘action’ that contributed to her win we would have seen it.
Small talk about making a ‘big move’ but not ‘making a big move’ is a great vacation video, but it does nothing for the advancement of the game.
Players rarely even talk on screen about the million dollars they are competing for. Do you know why?
Because they are not competing, it’s a “microcosm of society.”
THE DAN SPILO THING
Season 39 had its first firing of a castaway. Dan was, according to another castaway, lecherous and was perpetrating sexual harassment against her. This may or may not have been true, but such is the nature of reality TV.
Dan, in being cast, went thru after an exhaustive interview process that includes psychologists.
How did this situation come about? Sparks will fly if producers install a letch into a very highly sexualized environment where cuddling at night within alliances is ritualistic, needed to keep warm and increases alliance bonds. And sparks did fly.
Were producers, people who have done this for many years, who have gone through thousands of applicants and who have a mathematical approach to managing all aspects of the game to generate tv ratings and to how the game is managed, surprised that their plans worked?
His audition video was celebrity packed and had a woman saying he is aggressive and doesn’t take no for an answer, but producers didn’t know he was lecherous, aggressive and won’t take no for an answer to get what he wants. Did the producers not know that casting strong women in that season would create a likely clash with Dan?
If this show was faithfully just a ‘microcosm of society’ then Dan would never have made it through the interview process, he would have been rejected. Dan wore his character on his sleeve. And that’s what the producers wanted.
If Survivor is, as Jeff proclaims it to be, “a microcosm of society” then so is its elite machinations to cause social friction, stage managed by the metaphorical wizards behind the curtain.
Why would they do this?
#MeToo at that time was a powerful social movement, how producers, owners of the show, owners of the networks and the advertisers dictate what they need the show to do in their role as influence technicians. They wanted the show to broaden the reach of their messaging and this obviously infiltrated the “microcosm of society.”
It is instructing the viewer on how they should react, the proper response. It was literally like the online anti sexual harassment courses that employers assign to employees on their first day at the job and regularly thereafter. And…
Conflict is profitable
- Did this draw publicity, of course it did, that was the point. It was, in a TV reality type of way, a red carpet event
- Did it lose viewers, nope. Of course people said they were upset with it and wouldn’t watch it, but the next season the show had dramatically increased its viewership to multi year highs. The average amount of viewers in the last few seasons:
- Season 37: David vs. Goliath – 7.46M
- Season 38: Edge of Extinction – 7.43M
- Season 39: Island of the Idols – 6.59M
- Season 40: Winner’s at War – 7.64M
TRIBALS
Tribals are presided over by the Producer, Jeff Probst. In both OLD and NEW SURVIVOR he is the interlocutor.
OLD TRIBALS
In the OLD SURVIVOR, Jeff directed the sessions so as to discover internecine conflicts and tensions within the castaways, tribes and alliances, and urge them to discuss how it affects their game play and their relationships.
It emphasized an ‘inside looking out’ perspective and gave the castaways good moments to distinguish themselves as individuals unbound from the ‘group’
NEW TRIBALS
In the NEW SURVIVOR Jeff still presides, but it’s been flipped to be weighted in favoring ‘outside looking in’ perspectives.
This is done by encouraging the castaways to express themselves using analogies and metaphors, “it’s like if you’re in a plane and you see a bird on the wing and it’s waving to you and then all of a sudden…” converting their experiences to conform to the producers syllabus.
VOTE OUT DIVERSITY
The NEW SURVIVOR “microcosm of society” is cast with a wide variety of cultures, genders, races and so on. This does not mean it is a community of disparate people with disparate views, the old definition of the term.
It is now a community of almost entirely a synthesis of Borg’d people who suffer the narcissism of small differences.
It’s of course a good thing to have diversity when it is meant to replicate the “microcosm of society” and seal it within the game, but here it is not.
Everything must be suspect to an ‘implicit bias’, of course this agitates disharmony as each group is pitted against the other.
Podcast Cliques supplicate to Middle Class Etiquette and each vote out is scrutinized to assign to each subset of a “microcosm of society” its suffering:
- “If a man played like this they would be hailed”, “when women do this they are called shrill and hysterical. But if a man does the same thing he is called strong, authoritative.” Conveniently neglecting that men are uniquely called “conman”, “used car salesman” and so on
- If the vote out is a Black person it is micro racism at best, macro racism at worst
- If they vote out an LGBTQIA+ person it is homophobic or transphobic gay
- If they vote out the white person it is because this becomes another exhibit that the white person that the show is biased against white people
SET DESIGN AND IDOLS vs PLAYERS
Players have to compete with the idols and set design for air time, this forces them to exaggerate an already exaggerated semi scripted TV reality show. They become extras in a movie vying for a speaking role.
In the OLD SURVIVOR there was a Minimum Viable Set Design. In the NEW SURVIVOR it has become a theatrical stage crowded with props.
Loneliness
26 DAY LIFETIME BONDS?
Post Survivor, cast members who shared a season must say that they became family, that they’ll always stay friends and so on and so on. Perhaps true when the show was 39 days and there was lots of down time, now it is 26 days and there is virtually no down time. And..
SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS
Taken away from the castaways is the essential OLD SURVIVOR creature comforts of cuddling at night in the shelter, it has been de rigueur.
In NEW SURVIVOR castaways sleep by themselves, no cuddling, existing in their own sleeping bags.
This is illimitable solipsism, they are 18 ‘ones.’
SMALL TRIBES
Small tribes don’t create the same mathematical possibilities for alliances. In larger groups, such as the OLD SURVIVOR, players could select from within 9 to 10 players, now it is 6. That’s a huge difference.
PODCAST CLIQUES
Podcasts and the show are in an alliance. Producers give the podcasts the survivor castaways for exit interviews and the usual cordialities of fandom. The podcasts and their regular contributors act as middle management bureaucrats reprimanding bad employees, praising the good.
There are only a few podcasts that cover Survivor, RobHasAPodcast has made itself a platform for not just this show but many other reality TV shows. It is in the business of reality TV making it a constituent in Survivors “microcosm of society’.
Few things are more disturbing to the podcast clique of hosts and guests than when a disproportionate number of women are voted out, or black people, or gays, or immigrants. It became a dominant subplot of Survivor podcasts just as it is with the show.
These are new out of the show advantages, how the castaways will be covered and the discourse around their play and motivations.
In the OLD SURVIVOR the show was able to create the persona of each player and the human behind the manufactured persona was almost entirely incapable of regaining their own true self.
In the NEW SURVIVOR the castaways have social media and more media outlets, but these can only be reached by the true human giving as much effort to correcting the record as they did to auditioning and game play.
PONDEROSA
In the OLD SURVIVOR, the ”ponderosa,’’ shaped our understanding of the show, and its players and their alliances and internecine squabbles that caused vote outs, and so on and so on. We see the players still as participants playing a game, but without the stress because having lost the game they have won a great vacation.
In the NEW SURVIVOR no ponderosa episodes are crafted, it is a black hole. This is because, having learned lessons resulting from a Ponderosa fiasco of tribal and alliance conflicts that carried over into that environment, the producers saw that they could not meticulously stage manage what happened there. In the next season, 42. Having an out of control “microcosm of society” being a genuine sampling with the racism and cruelties of Drea, no further visibility into genuine reality was allowed.
ANONYMIZING SEASONS AND PLAYERS
Producers have taken away the predominant identifier of each season, it’s theme. Parvati won Micronesia, Tony won Cayugan, Sandra won Pearl Island, Tyson won Blood vs Water
Now each season is designated only by a number. One castaway can easily have their identity blended into a blobby Borg organism.
There are several reasons for the UNpersoning.
First it’s humiliation, as players are threatened by producers to edit the show in such a way to remove any ability for the true person to claim status.
Secondly it removes the opportunity to tangle themes with the silhouettes of castaways. An openly transgender person is in hostile territory in a pirate themed season.
Third, it reduces the castaway’s opportunities to become a ‘celebrity’ by hijacking the theme brand. The seasons are QR codes.
CONCLUSION
The NEW SURVIVOR gives the show an appearance of continuity.
It’s still Jeff, there are still idols, there is still a beach, but those have become facades, hollowed out institutions. Will the show roll back to some earlier version? No
Instead it will go the other way. The producers will increasingly submerge the players in their substitute reality.
Making the show longer does not resolve its problems built into it at the OEM stage of its creation. Showing more of the players may help create contemporary stars such as the prestige that Sandra, Tony, Rupert, Coach enjoy.
Will the players be allowed to play the game rather than the game playing avatars?
No.
Because this is a microcosm of a distorted society.