The Tribe Hasn't Spoken Enough Yet If I Have Anything to Do With It!
The SURVIVOR post. Or: an evolving list of the embarrassing ways I've tried to make people watch with me.
I have a not-very-persuasive history of forcing people to watch my favorite show, Survivor. I keep mentioning this silly little hot-people-on-an-island show as formative culture1 as if reality television has real themes and value!! Any fan who’s stuck with a reality show from 2000 (season forty-six avail on Paramount+) probably dies bit when they’re met with “lol that’s still on?” or “I watched that back when (insert formative plot line from 2001-2004 like that man falling into a fire).” [That man has a name but I’m trying to cast aside my encyclopedic knowledge to appeal to the masses and pretend to be relaxed about it] {just kidding his name is Michael Skupin and he came back to compete again on season 25 and *fact checks Wikipedia* is also a registered sex offender… NEVERMIND}
Survivor isn’t even an underdog show, running semiannually for almost 24 years and at its peak had ~50 million viewers. Two different seasons nabbed the post- Super Bowl premiere slot. One season decided to split tribes by race! I’ve made dozens of attempts over the years to persuade people to hop aboard this train alongside me. For example, in high school it was perfectly okay to force friends into gambling over Survivor with me — there were pages printed with WordArt™ and I wouldn’t say it was rigged but I would say everyone else whom I made participate probably didn’t watch the show. You fail 100% of the tests you don’t study for…?
And as an adult (or a “grown-ass man”, to evoke a reality television term used when two people are arguing over childish things) I almost always make an obnoxious big deal about asking a parent or sibling to DVR the Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving episode so I can watch it when I descend on one of their homes for the holiday. This works to mediocre success, sometimes ignoring familial memory-making in lieu of TV (😇). Survivor persuasion is just one of my first-world struggles up there with campaigning for iPhone users to stop manually quitting apps on their phones (IT GENERALLY REDUCES BATTERY LIFE, STOP IT; LOTTA HILLS I’M DYING ON TODAY).
I recently finished Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. It’s been about two months since its initial drop, so as the buzz wore off it took me a while and reading consecutive good reviews to decide to add it to my watchlist. I had initially avoided the show as its creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were responsible for Game of Thrones, a show that, despite its hugeness in culture, was Not For Me. I could draw connections to other fantasy-epics that didn’t entice me (I bravely saw The Two Towers in theaters and took a good nap as that castle dealt with it’s itchy dry eye) but I don’t think that’s the main reason. I have a theory and it’s important to introduce another player (that I did watch) to explain my logic: Succession.
These are the two chief examples in my thesis that some of the most critically-acclaimed dramas in recent years are essentially dramatized Survivor. You loved Game of Thrones? Survivor. Succession? Also Survivor.
(Please read the above sentences with the cadence of Steve Jobs introducing the original iPhone.)
If you thought LOST was capitalizing on “popular island setting” when it premiered in 2004, whew you better be sitting down when you learn how influential reality show story arcs are to modern dramas!! When we’re promised a certain result from the jump, when there’s a clear “winner” to a series, sometimes speed works in your favor. Game of Thrones and Succession2 suffer from promising a certain result from the jump, setting up a premise that can be “answered” with one name, then proceeded to take years to get to that answer.3
This is not a case against so-called “filler episodes” (derogatory term tbh). So many shows (comedy AND drama) thrive because they are allowed to take their time to develop their characters and find an audience, so I’m not advocating for speedier and shorter TV, which is what streaming TV culture is made of. However, these types of series that are racing toward a single answer (who will win the throne, who will succeed as CEO, who will win the million dollars and title of sole survivor) are not afforded the same attention span. As easily as you can google who won the lowercase game of thrones, you can google who won any season of Survivor … if that seems counter to my argument that Survivor is worth the time, I see it the other way.
It’s difficult to keep viewers (me) engaged when we know exactly what we’re working toward, but spinning our wheels on our way towards there. I don’t care as much to watch a 73-episode show that can be “solved” with one google search result. I have Survivor introducing me to 18 new people biannually and wrapping up their stories and giving us a winner in 13 episodes each.
Where LOST differentiates, to bring back a previous example, is that even before the pilot episode concluded, it was clear the problem was not just “when will they get rescued?” and if the show leaned into that as the only plot, things would quickly become exhausting. Desperate Housewives, a slay every season, introduced new characters and plot lines in each season, so we didn’t go too long before new mysteries were introduced to be unraveled.
A drama episode in which no one dies or gets promoted or murders or falls in love or has a baby in a moving vehicle? Sashay away from the RuPaul’s Drag Race school of television pacing. When I think back on Succession, I dreadfully compare chunks of it to non-elimination episodes of reality competition shows. And as much as reality television is woven into the fabric of my being, there is no bigger waste of TV time than a non-elimination episode of a reality competition show!!!!
Starting a Substack newsletter and using it keep dropping stupid hints that this program still exists and your other favorite shows are just Survivor with scripts and higher budgets…4 Consider this my latest embarrassing thing I’ve done to make people watch Survivor. The only stupider thing I can do is… get cast on the show. Hey Jeff Probst, have you seen my three application videos in 2017, 2018, and 2023?! I don’t want to miss my shot before you go into a semi-retirement and try a talk show again.
3 Body Problem was fun by the way.
I decided to navigate over to netflix dot com to double check that one can still find two random seasons of Survivor (added in 2020 to appeal to a bored COVID crowd), and found out the streamer currently offers (at the time of this publication) one of my favorite seasons of the series, against general-fandom opinion. One I often suggest if anyone asks where to start. Despite being overwhelmed by the possibility of jumping into this show, you can start at any season.
Survivor: Millennials vs Gen X (season 33) reeks of boomer marketing in the season’s theme/subtitle, but it’s a premise which goes out the door relatively quickly to just embrace the solid cast.
And not for nothing, but it had one of the most exciting pre-Thanksgiving episodes ever, hooked a family member, etc etc.
Hot people on family-friendly broadcast network CBS as an adolescent probably shaped my brain in some ways!
“Wow Ryan, your journalism is so timely!'“ It’s fine, Succession has been eligible for awards up until last month.
Anyone who used the internet for 6 seconds on May 19-20, 2019 knew who "won the throne" against their will.
This comparison theory has lingered in my mind for so long that I recently wrote a bad “Succession with a Jeff Probst Survivor cameo” sketch for a writing class but I’ll spare you from reading an excerpt.