I had no idea, in May 2002, that I was attending the most politically consequential TV finale in American history.
As TV critic for Time magazine, I was covering the end of the fourth season of “Survivor,” live from New York’s Central Park. Wollman Rink was done up tiki-bar style in imitation of the reality show’s tropical-island setting. The cast-reunion host, Rosie O’Donnell, rode up to the stage on a motorcycle driven by Colby Donaldson, the runner-up of Season 2.
And backstage, the producer of “Survivor,” Mark Burnett, met Donald J. Trump, who had restored the skating rink and plastered his name all around it. Burnett had an idea: The showboat real estate developer and tabloid figure would be a perfect fit for a “Survivor”-like business reality show he wanted to make.
You can argue whether and how much the course of American history would be different if not for “Survivor.” But as the show airs its all-star 50th season — one for each star on the flag — it is clear that “Survivor” has been a game changer, on TV and off.
It wasn’t just a hit — though it was, since its first season in summer 2000, an enormous hit. It popularized reality TV and helped make it one of the defining cultural genres of our time. It started as a provocation that showcased duplicity and grew into an institution of family viewing. It is one of the country’s greatest entertainments and most unsparing mirrors.
Baseball may have had the 20th century, but in the 21st, whether you watched it or not, “Survivor” was America’s pastime.
OF COURSE, BEFORE IT IS A REFLECTION, or indictment, of society, “Survivor” is a game. (For those of you who have been marooned on an island for a quarter-century, it strands its cast in an isolated environment where they vote out one of their number in a “tribal council” every episode before the eliminated players choose a winner.)
But games have ideas. Monopoly started out as a critique of predatory landlords and became a celebration of capitalism. Football, George Carlin once joked, was a sports version of a U.S. tradition: “Ground acquisition.”
The idea behind “Survivor” is that social aptitude is the most important skill a person can have. It’s a complicated contest that tests strength, endurance and wits. (Contestants have built home replicas of “Survivor” puzzles and done grip-strength workouts to prepare for the show.) But you can be as strong, agile or clever as you want; if you can’t survive the vote, you’re done.
“Survivor,” in other words, is a political contest. Players form alliances and factions. They make promises and break them. They pitch themselves as strong providers, as charming rascals, as nurturers, as the kind of likable buddy you want to have a beer with, or at least drink from a coconut with.
The show creates a hermetic world in which your companions are allies, obstacles and resources to be managed. You depend on them to win challenges and keep the tribe fed, but they also stand between you and a million bucks. (Except for the all-star Season 40, the grand prize has thus far remained at that Dr. Evil figure since 2000, inflation be damned.) The relationships that develop can be real and transactional at the same time — like in real life.
WHEN THE SHOW PREMIERED, it shocked a lot of sensibilities. To its detractors, it was not just bad TV but a moral offense — “loathsome junk” that exploited people and encouraged lying and backstabbing. “Lord of the Flies” was often invoked.
The criticisms weren’t entirely wrong. The show had a social Darwinist streak. Even the wildlife B-roll footage — serpents slithering, insects preying — underlined a view of human nature as snaky and predatory. When Richard Hatch, a cocky, deceitful schemer, won the first season, it didn’t help the show beat the “rewards bad behavior” rap.
And yet: It was also an addictive, emotional, suspenseful story, full of victory and vengeance, that spotlighted types of people generally ignored by network dramas. The first season’s final-tribal-council speech by the truck driver Sue Hawk — in which she endorsed Hatch over his opponent, Kelly Wiglesworth, on the grounds that “the snake” should eat “the rat” — is as memorable a TV signature line as Walter White’s “I am the one who knocks.”
As the show went on, it became clear that there was more than one way to play the social game. You could be menschy or Machiavellian; you could be an exhibitionist or fly under the radar. You could outfit yourself with a halo or horns. (One season featuring returning players was subtitled “Heroes vs. Villains.”) What you couldn’t do was ignore the social game altogether: Russell Hantz, one of the game’s most ornery and aggressive players, was denied the win by two different final-tribal-council juries annoyed by his unpleasant play.
It was a show, and the players in it were performing, for the audience and for one another. But that isn’t the same as saying that “Survivor” isn’t “real.” Like many reality shows, it’s a story of real people really interacting in a contrived environment, with cameras everywhere.
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Maybe that made for exaggerated self-conscious behavior, but people don’t modulate their personae only on TV shows. They do it at school, on dates, at work. It was a TV show for people who had grown up on TV, and it was a prescient forerunner of how the social-media era, which put a camera in every pocket, would encourage everyone to stage curated versions of their lives and selves.
SOMETHING CLICKED. Over 50 million people watched the first season finale. And soon TV was full of imitators. After the Sept. 11 attacks, a month before the “Survivor” Season 3 premiere, there was a brief sentiment that the new, post-tragedy era would sweep away reality TV. Surely, viewers would return to more wholesome, uplifting entertainment, with real heroes and bad guys and clear-cut morals!
Instead, we got “The Bachelor,” “American Idol,” “Joe Millionaire” and numerous arrangements of housewives.
“Survivor” didn’t only influence reality TV. If the ABC executive Lloyd Braun didn’t pitch the idea of a prime-time drama about plane-crash castaways, inspired by the success of “Survivor,” we wouldn’t have “Lost,” which, along with its own legion of puzzle-show imitators, captured a different aspect of an era of conspiracy and paranoia.
In many ways, “Survivor” and its imitators were pursuing the same themes as 21st-century prestige TV, albeit in a more populist package and with more bug-eating. “Survivor” didn’t have the acclaim of “The Sopranos,” which began a year earlier, but it too challenged TV norms, by centering antiheroes in morally murky situations and trusting the audience to know the difference between representation and endorsement.
THIS MAY SOUND LIKE A HIGHFALUTIN WAY to describe a big-budget game show. But “Survivor” has never been modest about its ambitions. Burnett disclaimed the label “reality TV,” preferring “unscripted drama.”
Certainly, changes and conflicts in the larger society have made their way into the bespoke societies of “Survivor” casts. A 2017 season featured a transgender contestant, Zeke Smith, who was outed by another player during a tribal council. The incident, though uncomfortable, became a kind of teaching moment, treated with as much nuance as a reality-TV elimination ritual can manage.
Two years later, “Survivor” had its own #MeToo incident, and handled it badly. A player was ejected off-camera for incidents of inappropriate touching, but not until after viewers had seen female contestants complain about the behavior, while the offender stayed on the show.
Social experiments can go awry. The 13th season, “Cook Islands,” divided players into ethnic tribes: white, Black, Latino and Asian. It’s hard to imagine such a premise surviving a pitch room today.
Reality shows, like much TV, have often failed at depicting multicultural society. There is an ugly history of stereotyping (like positioning Black women as angry antagonists) and underrepresentation (“The Bachelor” didn’t get a Black lead until 2021). After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, a diversity initiative, championed in part by ex-“Survivor” contestants, got CBS to agree that the casts of its reality shows would be at least half people of color.
You can see the difference in the post-Covid seasons of “Survivor,” though it’s unclear how much longer that will last. Last year, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, preparing for a merger that required Trump administration approval, announced that it would curb its diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
SOCIETIES, EVEN MADE-FOR-TV ONES, change over time. This is true of “Survivor,” which is not the same show it was in 2000, either as a competition or as a social metaphor.
We still have the almost religious rituals and incantations (“Fire represents life,” “The tribe has spoken”). But “Survivor” has evolved from a reality show that pretended to be about a life-or-death struggle into a self-aware entertainment about people playing “Survivor.”
In the show’s early years, contestants were not supposed to even mention that it was a show. Referencing the production, or previous seasons and players, would break the illusion that we were watching castaways stranded in a remote wilderness that just happened to have its own game-show host.
Over the years, “Survivor” has flipped into a self-referential, meta experience. Players regularly reminisce about having grown up watching. (Whenever a contestant talks about “Survivor” being on before they were born, I sprout a new gray hair.) There’s a whole sportslike language of strategy and player types, like “goats” (perceived weak players dragged along to the end as easy competition) and “meat shields” (physically intimidating players, who you keep around so they’ll be targeted instead of you).
Indeed, you could say that “Survivor” is a sport now, with its own lore, greats (like Sandra Diaz-Twine and Rob Mariano, who returned as mentors in the season “Island of the Idols”) and media analysis. Rob Cesternino, a veteran of the “Amazon” and “All-Stars” seasons, founded the “Rob Has a Podcast” empire, whose breakdowns of “Survivor” and other reality shows are a Ph.D. seminar in gaming savvy.
Other alums have built entire careers in the larger world of reality TV. Parvati Shallow’s credits include “The Traitors,” “Deal or No Deal Island” and a win on “Australian Survivor”; Cirie Fields has won “Traitors,” competed on “Big Brother” and “Australian Survivor” and will take her fifth shot at winning the American game in Season 50.
ALL THIS IS AN OUTGROWTH of “Survivor” having aged over the years from a scandalous media provocation into a familiar, even wholesome, family entertainment institution. (My extended family is holding a “Survivor 50” player draft, which I fully expect to lose.)
In the process, “Survivor” has become a different kind of reflection of America. Even as our society and our politics have become more confrontational and tribal — and with the repeat election of the “Apprentice” host, more reality-TV-ified — “Survivor” has gotten kinder, gentler and mellower, particularly since its Covid production break.
It has explicitly avoided casting the kind of preening villains who dominated reality shows of the early aughts. Probst increasingly refers to the show as a “journey” of self-discovery. In the 49th season, he talked one contestant, Kristina Mills, through her grief over the death of her mother, which surfaced during a stressful moment in the competition. “The game of ‘Survivor’ gets you here,” he said. “But the experience you get while playing the game is the real prize.”
All the niceness can be a little much; some recent seasons feel like they could have used a teaspoon more spice. But it’s striking that TV’s stabbing-backs-and-eating-rats show now forms a pluralistic mini-society of people who, despite the inevitable battles and drama, find ways to compete (mostly) without bitterness.
It’s not unusual for a TV series to evolve, or for once-cutting-edge entertainment to mellow. But it feels like a comment on how dysfunctional and dyspeptic the country has become that a contest that is still about warring tribes now comes across as a relative utopia.
Has the game changed so much? Or have we?
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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