#40 - On Survivor
At the insistence of a friend and a Professor at Kellogg, I watched Survivor for the first time last year. I was instantly hooked! Now, with one month until the next season starts, I hope that you join me in watching the greatest spectacle that TV has to offer. Here’s why:
Survivor is the ultimate exercise in psychology and manipulation
I haven’t come across any other TV experience which is so psychologically and manipulatively intense as Survivor. Throughout the series, players must use their wit and strategy to build alliances, initially within teams and then with other players following the merging of groups. While they are doing this, they must simultaneously appear to be a skilled survivor player without seeming too skilled (which risks you getting voted out if players think of you as a threat). In latter weeks, when eliminated members are placed on a jury who selects the eventual winner, you have the additional lens of having to impress a jury of players whom you might have acted against. The level of skill needed to build a successful house of cards, without having it all collapse on you (similar to Otto von Bismarck) makes for incredibly exciting TV. You never know what is going to happen next.
The challenges are pure genius
Each week, teams (and later individuals) compete in challenges for either a reward (usually food) and immunity from elimination that week. The challenges are creative genius in its purest form. Challenges often mix strength, stamina, and intelligence, meaning that you really need to be firing on all cylinders to succeed. Challenges include everything from having to knock over blocks with a catapult, to having to solve a puzzle on an unstable block that your team has to balance with ropes, and even standing on a platform with your hands above your head (which lasted 5 and a half hours!). Each week, I would be blown away by whatever the challenge designers came up with and seeing something that new and innovative makes the watching even more exciting.
The game is structured for crazy surprises
Unlike my other favourite reality shows (Apprentice UK; Amazing Race), Survivor is structured for a lot of randomness and surprises.
The fact that the players collectively vote for who stays in and who is eliminated leads to a lot of uncertainty and randomness. The use of selective editing means that you don’t necessarily see all of the plotting that takes place in the background, resulting in some of the votes being complete surprises. Beyond this, people can find immunity idols (basically a necklace that you can play in the voting rounds to make yourself or someone else immune). However, these don’t always work [warning: spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the latest season] due to the existence of idol nullifiers, which invalidate any previously played idols.
Apart from the voting element, the game is physically and emotionally gruelling. Players spent 39 days on an island in Fiji, with minimal food, exposure to heat and tropical storms, and the mental exhaustion of having to compete for survival every few days. Players break down in different ways at different times, resulting in some very exciting TV.