Deprecated: mb_convert_encoding(): Handling HTML entities via mbstring is deprecated; use htmlspecialchars, htmlentities, or mb_encode_numericentity/mb_decode_numericentity instead in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/super-cool-ad-inserter/inc/scaip-shortcode-inserter.php on line 37
In a post a few weeks ago, I said that Survivor‘s Joel would turn out to be the greatest contestant ever to play the game.
He was obnoxiously big and strong and unabashedly uncaring about anyone else in the game. But he was also very smart and buried himself in game strategy from day one. He was employing tactics never seen before by playing an individual game from the jump.
Normally, players will keep their teams somewhat strong, because until you get down to the final 10, having a strong team is what keeps you in the game. But Joel had been dragging three weaker players — including Chet, the undernourished dish rag/pageant coach — with him the whole game, knocking out his biggest competition along the way.
I stopped short a few weeks ago of declaring him the winner. It’s a good thing, because his big ass is history. It seems that Chet led by Cirie, the queen of the weak players, and a couple of others talked the new odds-on-favorite Ozzy into dumping Joel before he either eliminated them or killed them in their sleep.
So this season is taking on an interesting twist. As all of the strong players try to drag along the lifeless, worthless corpses of the weak, the weak are banding together and picking off the strong one by one. Thanks to the power of creative reality show editing, we of course can see this crystal clearly, while everyone else in the game cluelessly wonders around bitching about the rain.
So at this point, I have no idea who’s going to win this thing, but the show has been a little boring this season so I’m actually wondering if I truly care. Of course as reality TV devotee/cult member I’m sure I’ll stick it out … At least I’ll stick around longer than Joel.
This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2008.
As a long-time viewer (I hesitate to say ‘fan’) of Survivor, I think I’m running into compassion fatigue–I’m not caring much about the outcome of this season.
I’m speculating that the fact for this is that the participants are now themselves fans–ie they’ve watched the show in previous seasons as much as I have. This kind of changes the premise–the Survivor team-members are now playing the game like us home viewers–so it seems that the paradise of reality television has been spoiled by the knowledge of home-viewing.
Or, maybe I should just apply to go on the show myself….
Undoubtedly, the format of Survivor has gotten pretty stale — particularly its insistence that all shows take place at pretty tropical beaches. (And I’m sympathetic — the off-beach seasons have struggled, if only that we don’t see hot, dirty people in bathing suits all the time.)
I’ve long joked that since Survivor has become institutionalized, the producers should really bust it open — mostly by putting people in more realistic, but trickier survival situations. (I know all of us who live in cities, and don’t drive everywhere, would love to see a bunch of pampered surburbanites dropped into some urban jungle … Another great meta-Survivor would be seing how long any rational adult could have lasted with those brats in Kid Nation …)
that’s why I tuned in Sunday to DUMPED (more to this blog later), BBC’s reality show where a group got left at a landfill to survive. Its primary purpose is eco-education, but at least somebody is breaking far from the Club-Med-minus-pina-coladas Survivor format.