'Survivor's Sue Smey and 'The Summit's Jeannie Geyer Talk How Motherhood Brought Them Onto Reality TV

When talking to reality TV alums, I often hear them talk about how the community they form during a season is akin to a family. After all, whether on an island, in a house, or on a mountain, the cast of strangers is each other’s entire world for as long as the show is filming. Through good times and bad, they lean on each other for emotional and sometimes physical support, no matter how individualistic their goals might be.

For some contestants, joining that second family came primarily from inspiration from their first. That was the case for Sue Smey, a contestant on Survivor 47. The flight school owner is this season’s oldest castaway at 59–though you can see from the exclusive sneak peek of this week’s episode below that’s not something she plans to be open about. She is also the only mom to play in this group of 18 castaways, and she credits the long-running show with getting through an incredibly difficult time while her daughter Chelsea was dealing with complications from juvenile diabetes.

Related: Everything to Know About Survivor 47

“You’re scared,” she recalls to Parade about the experience while attending the “Survivor Beach Drop” pop-up event in Brooklyn on October 5. “You don’t know if they’re gonna survive, if they’re gonna make it through. We had Jeff come into our living room once a week. And I remember looking around and seeing all of us focus on the TV. You forgot about whether she’s gonna live or die. You forgot about the unknown of what was happening to her. We lived in depression; we lived in fear. We didn’t know what was going on. And forever in my heart, Jeff will always be such a part of our lives. Because it took us away. We smiled, and we laughed, and we screamed, and we were excited. We had lost that.”

Thankfully, Chelsea made a full recovery. But Survivor would become more than just a comfort show for Sue. Last year, while Season 45 was airing, Chelsea would constantly text her mother about how she visualized her out on the island. After enough encouragement, Sue put in a video and heard back from casting on her very first audition.

“I said, ‘Let me lead by example. Let me show her that at whatever age you are, step out of the box. If there’s something you always dreamed of, something you’ve always wanted to do, a change in your life, whatever it is, you just kind of put that effort in.’ And I put the effort in.”

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The story is a bit different for The Summit star Jeannie Geyer, also the oldest person on the season at 56. The grocery store worker had watched Survivor in the early 2000s and, in an instant, knew she was meant to be on that screen. Thus began a 20+ year process of applying for every show under the sun, from reality shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race to game shows like The Price is Right and Family Feud. All the while, Jeannie was taking care of an ever-growing family–her daughter was four years old when she first started her road to reality TV–trying to keep her hopes alive.

“Every day, I did a little bit of something to follow my dream,” she explains to Parade. “It was taking the kids to basketball to soccer to golf. But at night, I looked up when the casting calls were, when the videotapes had to be in, because that would make me happy. And then I actually brought my kids, when they were a little older, into the casting calls with me. And I got them excited. ‘This is Mommy’s dream, and you never give up.'”

After years of trying, the call finally came for Jeannie, but in a very unexpected way. She was asked to be on a brand-new reality show, the premise of which would not be revealed until the game began. No matter what the circumstances, it was an emphatic “yes” to the opportunity. Even when she was surprised by what she was tasked to do on the new CBS series–summit a mountain in the New Zealand Alps in 14 days while voting each other out along the way–upon being told, “Climb,” she simply responded, “How high?”

Indeed, the tenacity and strength of both Jeannie and Sue is exemplified in the season premieres for each of their shows. Sue was a standout in the opening challenge, as she carried back heavy puzzle pieces on her own, being welcomed back with an ovation from her new tribemates. Jeannie, meanwhile, took to the immediately arduous circumstances with an unshakable resolve. And that attitude continues with the altitude, as shown in the exclusive sneak peek of this week’s second episode below.

Related: Everything to Know About The Summit

Of course, living in an incredibly pressurized environment that physically, mentally, and emotionally depletes you is no easy feat. Simultaneously, despite building camaraderie with fellow contestants, there’s that ever-existing thought that they’re ultimately your competition and could easily turn from a friend to enemy. Everyone needs that wellspring of positivity and support they can turn to in a moment of crisis. Naturally, for Jeannie, those were the people who had been with her on this journey from the beginning.

“I was picturing my son and daughter before I left for the plane,” she recalled. “‘Ma, you got this. You’ve been trying out for years. You’re not gonna give up. No matter how hard it is, you better get back up and go for it. Don’t be scared. Don’t be crying. Be tough. Be the badass mom.’ And that’s who I am, the badass mom on The Summit!”

It’s not a completely fail-proof solution, though. We’ve seen through the years that homesickness can only be magnified by the deprivation of reality television. And we have seen some choose not to actually keep their support system in the forefront of their mind for fear of pulling them out of a game that requires your full attention. That is the case for Sue.

“I tried not to think about home,” she reveals, “because it made you homesick, and it pushed you in a different direction. If I was so emotional, I was worried that my daughter would see me emotional, and that bothered me. So I was like, ‘I hope this doesn’t get aired, because I don’t want her to see her mom crying or somebody being mean to me.’ I think that’s hard to know when your family’s gonna see that. I just tried showing my strength. And I pulled through, knowing that she could see that maybe there was something going on, but I needed to be strong. You just gotta try. And you gotta just fight through it, and you can make it.”

Related: Meet the Full Cast of Survivor 47

Regardless of how much they thought of their family, both Sue and Jeannie were welcome to return to them. Both women have elected not to tell their loved ones about what may have transpired on the show, including how far they made it and whether they took home the life-changing prize. So far, it’s been an incredibly entertaining experience, as they’ve sat sidecar to the reactions to their highs and lows being broadcast on national TV.

With Jeannie and Sue’s reality TV origin stories both heavily involving their children, it begs the question: What are the chances we get the next generation following in their footsteps? While Sue told me she would love the chance to see the Smey bloodline continue on the island, her family life and more introverted personality are keeping her off the beaches of Fiji for now.

For Jeannie, though, it’s the exact opposite. Her son, who she had in the midst of her decades-long bevy of auditions, is as hungry to get on TV as his mother. In fact, as I speak with her, he’s seated about 20 feet away, in a “casting hut” set up during the pop-up event specifically for attendees to give their 30-second pitch on why they should be part of the next group of Survivor castaways.

“I love it,” Jeannie remarked. “I wanted to see if he got excited coming with me to casting and watching. And he’s like, ‘Oh my god, I love this.’ So I’m like, ‘Alright, you got the bug!’ I knew he was meant to do this, just like his mom.”

Next, Parvati Shallow Calls The Traitors Her Reality TV “Renaissance.“