How Survivor changed television – and our culture – forever | Canada Voices

Danielle J. Lindemann is a professor of sociology at Lehigh University and author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.

“From this tiny Malaysian fishing village,” a voiceover explains, “these 16 Americans are beginning the adventure of a lifetime.” In the island town, small houses cluster together, interspersed with palm trees.

The “16 Americans,” clad in casual, late-1990s attire, move through its streets as a monolith of loose T-shirts, cargo pants and floppy-brimmed hats. Local children point and stare.

The Americans board a boat, and we the viewers, along with the locals, watch it depart.

The music changes, becoming shanty-like as the boat cuts through the sea.

“They have volunteered to be marooned for 39 days on mysterious Borneo,” the narrator, whose name is Jeff Probst, tells us.

A sandy shore. A large snake, swimming. A reptile. A monkey.

“This is their story. This is Survivor.”

In late May of 2000, a friend asked if I’d heard about a new TV show that was about to premiere. It was a competition, she said, in which real people would be exiled from a real island. That can’t be right, I thought, imagining contestants set adrift on rafts. She was convinced that they would be thrown from a boat into the sea, but I was skeptical.

It may seem inconceivable today, in this era of media saturation, that some of us went into the inaugural season of Survivor wondering whether people would be literally pushed out to sea, their lives imperilled. But Facebook and Twitter were years away, and we didn’t have an array of search engines to consult. We didn’t think to “Ask Jeeves” what the deal was with this castaway show. We went in unspoiled.

As a sociologist who studies reality TV, I‘ve talked to a lot of people who remember exactly where they were when Richard Hatch took home the million-dollar pot on that first season of Survivor. Our personal experiences with the season seem burned into our brains, like the announcement of OJ Simpson’s acquittal or, for a different generation, the Kennedy assassination. People who, today, don’t give a whit about reality TV can still recall how Richard walked around naked, fishing with a spear, or reference competitor Sue Hawk’s “rat and snake” speech from the final tribal council.

It also may be difficult to remember – or to comprehend, for those who are too young – how limited our television options were at the time. Those of us who didn’t pay for cable were confined to just a handful of choices when we switched on our TVs. We had to watch whatever was on, and suddenly everybody was watching Survivor. That first summer, more than 51 million viewers tuned in for the season finale.

In retrospect, that number, while massive, fails to capture the show’s seismic impact on the landscape of contemporary television.

It is difficult to overstate the reverberations of Survivor on reality TV as a genre. True, it was not the first reality show. That distinction goes to … well, take your pick.

Some media historians point to the quiz shows of the 1950s or dating shows of the 1960s when tracing the origins of reality TV, while others highlight the role of Candid Camera or the 1973 PBS documentary An American Family. Many people pinpoint MTV’s The Real World, first airing in 1992, as the beginning of the genre. Media and communication scholars Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, for instance, have argued that The Real World pioneered many of the conventions that are integral to reality programs like Survivor today – for example, its “serial structure,” and casting procedures that were “intended to ignite conflict and dramatic narrative development.”

So, Survivor was not the starting point for the reality genre. It wasn’t even the first reality show with its premise! Survivor‘s executive producer, Mark Burnett, duplicated its format from the Swedish program Expedition Robinson, which had aired three years earlier.

But Survivor changed everything.

For one thing, the show was an economic juggernaut and the first real indication of how lucrative the reality genre could be. Season one of Survivor paid for itself in advertising revenue before it even aired. This was a pivotal moment in the history of brand integration, with the network cashing in every time the castaways crunched Pringles or sported Reeboks. “Advertainment”– entertainment that is also commercially oriented – has gone on to become an integral part of the reality genre.

As the media scholar June Deery has observed, reality programs “tend to normalize the embedding of commercial agenda into experience.” This has become truer with the rise of social-media influencers and sponsored content; folks now appear on these shows to boost their follower counts and generate revenue. These days, it’s not just the networks recognizing and exploiting the economic possibilities of the reality genre.

That said, while the early contestants on Survivor were significantly less image-savvy and much more likely to have regular old jobs than the ones today, they, too, garnered fame and exposure from their participation in the show. Richard, for instance, has since appeared on at least five different reality programs, including a stint on The Celebrity Apprentice – his notoriety being enhanced by a criminal conviction for tax evasion. The season-one Survivor runner-up, Kelly Wiglesworth, a more low-key persona who has been nowhere near as publicly visible since appearing on the show, nonetheless has 75,000 followers on Instagram.

In addition to showing the world that reality television was a potential gold mine, season one of Survivor also generated some of the terms and conventions that remain hallmarks of the genre. Richard, for example, spoke about creating an “alliance” with fellow cast members – a term that’s now used broadly on competition programs beyond Survivor.

When Kelly said that she was “not out here to make friends,” it’s unlikely she foresaw that this would become a wide-ranging catchphrase, with legions of reality stars across a multitude of programs still uttering it a quarter-century later. And Survivor lingo has moved beyond the competition-TV bubble and entered our lexicon more generally. Today, if you say your annoying co-worker “so needs to be voted off the island,” folks will likely get the reference and catch your drift.

As the infiltration of its terminology into our everyday lives might suggest, Survivor didn’t just change reality TV; it changed our culture. Unscripted programming went on to become one of the dominant television genres, its unmistakable conventions even bleeding into scripted shows like The Office, Modern Family, and Abbott Elementary. And, buoyed by the success of Survivor, Mark Burnett produced other long-running reality TV hits, including shows like Shark Tank and The Voice.

Among Mr. Burnett’s projects, arriving four years after the premiere of Survivor, was The Apprentice, a reality series in which contestants vied for a job with businessman Donald Trump. Though the beach was replaced by a board room, and “The tribe has spoken” became “You’re fired!”, The Apprentice followed the same formula that had proven so successful on Survivor. Both shows were “gamedocs” – a subset of reality TV that’s part-game show, part-dramatic reality series. On each, the contestants’ eliminations were punctuated by a snappy catchphrase that became inexorably linked to that show.

Whether Donald Trump would have been elected President of the United States without appearing on The Apprentice is an unanswerable question. We know that The Apprentice presented an appealing, curated image of Mr. Trump as a wealthy and capable big shot, shrewd in business but also a family man, with his adult children flanking him in the boardroom.

We know from decades of media research that television holds the power to shape the public’s attitudes and beliefs. And we know that The Apprentice went on for 14 seasons with Mr. Trump at the helm, catapulting him into public consciousness on a colossal scale. Like Survivor, the show was massively popular – 40 million viewers watched at least part of its first-season finale.

Survivor plausibly played a part in creating not only a President who has appeared on reality TV but also a “reality-TV President” – one who utilizes the tropes of these shows to appeal to his base. Mr. Trump, like the creators of Survivor, knows a thing or two about branding. In addition to his trademark hairstyle and signature lingo (“Fake news!”, “Sleepy Joe!”, “#sad”), he has used his political platform to bring attention to his various business ventures.

His explanations for world affairs, like episodes of reality TV, are often simplistic stories that rely on broad characterizations of easily identifiable heroes and villains. (Incidentally, the 20th season of Survivor was subtitled “Heroes Vs. Villains.”) Mr. Trump also uses cliffhangers and big reveals – for example, when he unveiled Neil Gorsuch as his first Supreme Court pick in 2017, after an earlier teaser on Twitter (now X).

This February, during an explosive meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, evocative of a Survivor tribal council but with far higher stakes, Mr. Trump mused, “This is going to be great television. I will say that.” Given Mr. Trump’s propensity for running his presidencies like reality shows, it is perhaps no accident that he has also stocked his staffs with reality-TV-adjacent personalities like Omarosa Manigault Newman (The Apprentice), Sean Duffy (The Real World), Linda McMahon (of WWE fame), Pete Hegseth (until recently a Fox News host), and Dr. Mehmet Oz (The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Dr. Oz Show).

Finally, Mr. Trump has benefitted from operating in the blurry space between truth and fiction that reality TV also occupies. Many viewers seem to understand reality TV as both “real” and “fake,” acknowledging its scripted and contrived elements while also allowing it to resonate with us. Similarly, studies show that Mr. Trump’s followers don’t necessarily have to believe what he says in order to support him and feel he is a strong leader. Though he regularly casts doubt on objective truths, ranging from comical (the size of his inauguration crowd) to weighty (the decades of robust science supporting vaccines), Mr. Trump’s appeal exists on an emotional level. And perhaps this is why so many Americans have been reticent to vote him off the island.

Survivor, now in its 48th season, is noteworthy not only for its role in shaping the television landscape and its broader cultural impact, but also for its sheer longevity. My college students, few of whom have seen The Apprentice or even heard of The Real World, still watch Survivor – a show that has been on the air for longer than they have been alive. In 2000, the show benefited from its novelty, a paucity of other TV options, and word of mouth, but that doesn’t explain why folks are still binge-watching tribal councils on their streaming services a quarter-century later.

One of the continuing appeals of Survivor – in addition to its drama and intrigue – is its blend of escapism and familiarity. The show features interesting scenarios and challenges removed from our everyday lives, while remaining relatable. Its small-group dynamics – featuring friends, enemies, frenemies, bromances, wary allies, and even romances – are widely resonant, and the casts teem with archetypes we encounter in our own lives, from the quirky outsider to the charismatic snake (I’m looking at you, Boston Rob).

It’s not the same show it was in May of 2000. Its format has been tweaked, and new thematic twists introduced (“Redemption Island”! “Millennials vs. Gen X”! “All-Stars”!) Season-one competitor Rudy Boesch‘s casual references to Richard, a gay man, as “a queer” are an artifact of their time – or, at least, not likely something that would air on network TV today.

And just as Survivor has spurred cultural change, it also reflects our changing world. In 2020, for example, in the wake of racial protests surrounding the death of George Floyd, CBS introduced an initiative to diversify the cast, pledging that at least half of the cast members of its unscripted programs would be people of colour.

Reality television, the house that Survivor helped build, remains firmly intact. “DIY” reality shows now proliferate on TikTok and YouTube, helmed by individuals with smartphone cameras and stars in their eyes, but these co-exist with, rather than supplanting, the streaming and network shows. Survivor‘s most recent season premiere, for example, drew 4.3 million viewers.

While the future of reality TV is difficult to predict, as long as these shows are relatively cheap to produce and widely consumed, they will continue to be a dominant force in popular culture. Some might argue that the genre is unsustainable in that it continually needs to up the ante, becoming more and more outrageous to stay relevant.

They cite recent programs like Beast Games, a Squid Game-inspired series hosted by YouTuber Jimmy (MrBeast) Donaldson, in which an unprecedented 1,000 contestants competed for a US$5-million pot. Others point to that British show where potential romantic partners are evaluated based on their naked bodies.

However, viewers who think reality TV is moving toward an untenable peak of outrageousness clearly do not remember shows like The Swan (2004) or Dating Naked (2014-2016). The genre is not any weirder now than it was, say, in 2014, when women competed for the affections of a Prince Harry doppelgänger whom they had been told was the real deal.

Reality TV will stick around for the immediate future, its outrageousness waxing and waning, like the fashions from that first season of Survivor, which have become unstylish, stylish, and then unstylish again. It will continue to dovetail with social media and incorporate new technologies. Can a Humans vs. A.I.s season of Survivor, for instance, be far on the horizon?

Survivor‘s legacy is its key role in the rise of a culture-dominating genre, which arguably wrought a President who casts aspersions on reality in deeply concerning ways. But we can’t lay Donald Trump all at the feet of Survivor. The President stokes social antagonisms and a disregard for objectivity that were already latent in our culture. Donald Trump just lit a match to a tiki torch already doused in gasoline.

It may be tempting to look at Mr. Trump’s rise and think of the legacy of Survivor as a dark one, but the truth is much more nuanced. It’s also important to remember why we watch and what it can do for us. The viewership of shows like Survivor transcends age and sociodemographic categories, allowing us to draw closer to each other as we chatter about its drama at watch parties, around office water coolers, and online.

And reality TV has historically been more diverse than scripted media, when it comes to race as well as sexuality. In fact, while Rudy’s terminology for Richard may be jarring today, the two men were close allies on that inaugural season, seemingly forging a real friendship. Richard, furthermore, was presented as multidimensional rather than simply “the gay guy,” per so many media representations of non-heterosexual folks at that time.

Survivor, and the shows that followed, have given us entry into new worlds and possibilities we might not otherwise have seen – not just remote islands but subpopulations, from doomsday preppers to drag queens, who are often overlooked by scripted media. Finally, binge-watching reality TV has soothed many of us through difficult periods, including a global pandemic and the current, terrifying cycle of world events.

Donald Trump is still the President of the United States. (In fact, he has recently mused about seeking a third term, despite that being prohibited by the Constitution.) Buffered by his hit show and using the conventions of reality TV to facilitate his rise, he has had immense cultural staying power. Still, I am confident that Survivor will still be airing long after he’s left office. When those “16 Americans” first set foot in that fishing village, they could not have anticipated how this juggernaut would change our lives. A quarter-century later, Survivor is still clutching its immunity idol – a tantalizing blend of fantasy and universality – and it’s not going to give that up any time soon.