The True Meaning of Survivor

The video crews and 16 players went to their remote island in April, and stayed for 39 days. Each week involved 3 days of filming from several cameras. Hundreds of hours of tape to make the 45 minutes shown each week, and about 25 minutes of "character" development -- the rest being tribal council and contests.

That's a lot of editing. The thing to remember is they did all this editing, for every episode, already knowing who the winner of the contest would be. There are no surprises for the producers. Some, including myself, speculate that they might have been manipulating the various challenges to assure the teams stayed even. This may or may not be true, but you don't have to manipulate the result if you control what people see on the way there.

One thing is certain. The producers want ratings. You can be sure you are seeing, in the .1% of the total footage that you do see, the clips that the producers think will produce the best ratings for the show and the best demand for a second show. They are not journalists producing a documentary, trying to give the most accurate representation of the events on the island. They want fans, and ratings.

TV producers know how to make a compelling story, even when working with unscripted material. The ideal story involves drama, heated competition, and victory by an underdog. If the probable winner becomes obvious, they don't want you to see that any more than they want a 42-7 SuperBowl. Unlike the SuperBowl, they don't show you the whole game.

After the winner was selected, the producers probably said to their editors and directors, "Put together a show that will make this person's victory interesting and draw viewers." Get us ratings.

There are a lot of ways they could do that, and to give strong credit to Mark Burnett, they don't do the standard plot. You might expect them to make a drama of good and evil, back and forth, with the winner an underdog who comes from behind to beat the bad guy at the last minute. They don't just stick with that. But they do still want ratings.

They can do this and could do it no matter who wins. No matter what you think about the characters, be they smart, stupid, honest, scheming, hard-working, friendly, hard or compassionate, you can be sure this is what the producers wanted you to see. Film anybody for 39 days and compress it down to just a few minutes and you can find clips where anybody seems, for a short time, to have any attribute you want them to have. Of course the truth is an easier story to paint, and as long as the truth is interesting, that is your first choice.

For example, in Survivor 1, they were happy to paint the winner as the schemer. Turns out he played the game quite ethically, but they went for the "villain you love to hate" with the mainstream audience.

Interviews

Their main tool for manipulation of the story is the interviews. As you notice, they are constantly showing asides to the cameras by players. I presume these are not random, but the results of interviews. But you don't see the questions. You don't see all the answers. With this technique, you can make anything happen. You can keep asking a question a different way until you get a set of answers to choose from.

I'm sure that one of the questions they ask all the players every day is, "So, what do you like about player X? What do you dislike?"

I suspect another is "So what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses?"

With these questions, you can lots of footage that says something bad about every player, and footage that says something good about every player. Lots of footage of every player being cocky. Lots of footage of every player being humble. All you need to present any player any way you want to make the final result more dramatic when you edit it together.

Manipulation

While it seems that manipulating what you see should be more than enough, it seems to me there may be more than that. I am not sure why.

The producers are required by US laws (which apply here) to make the game fair. We haven't seen the full rules, but "fair" can mean a lot of things. They can't directly help individual contestants, but what about indirectly? It seems to me they design the challenges with probable victors in mind.

One thing that leads me to believe that is the remarkable coincidence that the teams remained balanced all through the first six weeks. One team lost a challenge, then the other, to leave them all at 5 members each when they merged. Had the two gotten out of balance by 2 or 3 players the challenges would have gotten less sporting.

I found it remarkable that they arranged a row & swim challenge when one team had a professional rower and the other had an alleged non-swimmer. I think they did it to manipulate who the teams would pick to row. The producers knew that the rowing would be simple and short, mostly a contest of physical strength, so they manipulated the teams into picking a strong male against a strong female, but made experience unimportant. Given 3 days of training (not shown), a basketball coach can learn how to row straight. And will beat a woman through superior strength.

Of course what they showed made sure we thought the other way. They just told us professional river guide vs. guy who can't swim. They gave the audience the underdog victory.

Another challenge involved shooting: Blowgun, slingshot, spear. They sure showed footage to make you think one team would win. They edited this footage after they knew they lost, of course. And strangely, after showing the first two contests without telling you the intermediate results, they announce that only the spear contest will actually count. In fact, the previous two contests just provide more fruit for the winner. And the players don't even protest -- on camera. And of course, in the spear, the team they showed as underdog wins.

Another challenge: Swim, Row, Run, Dig. They show Gervase, the YMCA coach, collapsed in the running section. They show his opponent running smoothly. Yet when the both get back to the beach, not too far apart all their running is irrelevant. All that matters is the digging. Odd.

Each week, the focus a bit on who might be voted off. They show you people saying good things and bad things about each person. They keep it interesting. They make you think one person is doomed but never make you sure. Drama.

It is for this reason that I don't hold them above certain "fair" manipulations to assure that the final result they get is something they can turn into the best ratings-getting-plot.

Mystery

While Survivor is a drama, it is also really in the "mystery" genre. As they ask every episode, "Who will be voted off the Island this week?" You might consider it a "Whowunnit."

In a mystery, there is constant misdirection. Some, though not all, of what you see is put in to lead you down the garden path to false conclusions. It is necessary that the ending be a surprise, but that you say, "aha, now I see how all the clues fall into place" on the last page.

This misdirection makes prediction harder, unless you learn to see past it. However, done well, misdirection is done only half the time, so you can't easily tell if you are being tricked or given real information.

Added note: Of course they didn't have total control over what would happen. They would rather not have had a conspiracy come in and quickly wipe out the other tribe, but they had to work with that, and make it seem the tribe had a chance all the way through. So one of the Tagis wins, but it won't be the ones presented as the bad guys.

Myths

I have detailed some of the illusions I think the producers are trying to produce on Survivor.

Speculation on who wins

The misdirection -- in particular the attempts to make people believe it would be other than a Tagi slam-dunk, at first portreyed Pagong characters as more likable. Sympathy was raised for Jenna, Gervase and Colleen.

Rich and Sue are the "bad guys" at present, Sean either is dumb, is playing dumb and/or is portrayed as dumb. Rudy is not shown much, which may mean he is being prepared to be the most likable alliance member. Kelly is shown as the one with conscience, but somehow she seems hard to like. Her real world persona seems pretty nasty, based on her police records.