Now you may be wondering: why would such a clairvoyant, handsome viewer like myself sit through more than 20 seasons of a show like Survivor? For love, dear reader. For love. While I can’t claim to have ever auditioned for the show (or taken swim lessons to prepare for it), I do actually adore Survivor.
“But it’s not even that real,” you say. You only see a fraction of what happens- the stuff the people making the show want you to see,” you feebly protest.
Exactly.
Don’t get me wrong I’ve had plenty of fun binging Survivor with friends and just laughing at the silly people in the TV show being horrible to each other. But I genuinely believe that the show is a fascinatingly nuanced work of creative brilliance. For me, watching Survivor is an intensely negotiated exercise in piecing together fragments of truth to make inferences about where the show is headed and who will eventually win. It’s a whodunnit. And like any good mystery, it still works even once you’ve peeked behind the curtain.
Because it’s true: there’s so much that happens during those 39 (or 26, sigh) days that you as a viewer never see. But that means that what you do see is there for a reason. Part of the show’s core appeal is indeed the illusion that you’re watching real people do real things. But really, when you watch a season or even an episode of Survivor you’re engaging with a version of reality that those making the show have intentionally crafted for the sake of narrative. When you consider that- for any given season- Survivor’s editors sift through hundreds of hours of real, random footage and piece it all together into something coherent, you start to recognize Survivor for the creative undertaking that it truly is. And given that the brilliant minds behind the show have been performing this feat for 25 years across 46 seasons, you can bet they’re fucking good at it.
Like anything airing on television, Survivor needs you to keep watching it. The methods by which it achieves this on an episode-to-episode basis or even within a single episode’s runtime are pretty straightforward: cutting to commercial break on a cliffhanger, showing teasers of next week’s juicy action at the end of every episode, etc, etc- you’ve seen it all before. But it’s through careful cultivation, of the personalities and arcs of contestants who go the distance- especially the eventual winner- that Survivor works its real magic.
After all, any good story needs a satisfying conclusion. If you the viewer invested in the narratives of season after season of Survivor only to be continually subjected to winners who were shown to be unlikeable people or undeserving contestants, you’d probably get fed up and drop the show. The game’s mechanics work to circumvent this outcome to an extent, but it’s the editors’ responsibility to make you root for, like, or at the very least understand the winning contestant and their gameplay enough to be satisfied when they inevitably bring home the million.
Watching Survivor with this understanding transforms the way you interpret literally every on-screen interaction in literally every scene; it becomes a constant game of analysis that involves interpreting your own readings of everything that happens throughout the season to predict its outcome.
I will grant that the average Survivor viewer is probably not quite as neurotic as yours truly. After all, millions of people still tune in every week to watch the show and I can’t imagine they’ve all read Stuart Hall’s chapter on encoding and decoding. But I think if a piece of art can be enjoyed at such wildly varying levels of engagement, that has to count for something. Some reality TV may be trash. Survivor, however, is good trash.
One reply on “Survivor slaps now read my post <3”
My dear, sweet Gabriel-
I, too, love good trash!!! And I, too, have found myself reading good trash differently in terms of encoding and decoding, as well as in terms of semiotics. In recently watching what is objectively the best program on network TV, Ghost Adventures, I found myself not letting it wash over my half-sleeping body as is usually the case, but rather doing the same sleuthing you do when watching Survivor—looking for the seams, watching the editors bend over backwards to make sense of the bullshit these idiots get paid to proselytize (actually, this idiot: Zak Bagans, leader of the Ghost Adventures squad and my #1 favorite worst person in America. No disrespect to Aaron or the AV guys). The show encodes messages about the existence of God and the Devil into your run-of-the-mill ghost hunting convos. It becomes clearer in more recent seasons how Christian-oriented the show is, though it has always dealt with Western ideas of the soul, possession, the afterlife, etc. By buying into (dominantly-decoding) their message, the viewer also (perhaps unwittingly, or at least not über-consciously) buys into Christianity and all its problematic at best definitions of sin. Issues that are clearly attributable to mental illness are blamed on demons; the gang offers no solutions except their own version of empirical evidence of strange happenings, often in the form of unintelligible ‘voices’ heard through the Spirit Box (google if you don’t know) and dust specks in the camera lens. Reading the show from a negotiated/oppositional perspective hasn’t yet spoiled the fun for me, largely because I don’t see this program having any actual lasting negative impact on the world. But it is certainly worth watching through a critical lens to figure out how these people have made a living attempting to document the unknown.
Peace and blessings,
Esmé