Survivor - Longest-Surviving Reality Game Show

Ten years. Not many televisions shows have been on the air so long. But since Survivor seasons last about 13 - 16 episodes they have managed to air 20 seasons, about two seasons a year. About the same number of seasons as The Simpsons in half the time. What is more impressive is how Survivor is the longest running reality game shows on television outlasting such one time top rated programs as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire which retreated into the afternoons, Fear Factor, and The Apprentice which only survives as celebrity versions. And there is no doubt that Survivor has changed American television creating a niche for reality shows that had not existed before.

Survivor came on the heels of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and American adaption of a British game show of the same name. It was not really a reality show but would retrospectively fall into the category once the genre was established. Instead Who Wants to be a Millionaire was a standard quiz show with the added element of drama. Instead of telling a contestant if he got the answer right or wrong the host would ask if that was his final answer, then wait a few moments while dramatic music played before telling him. It had been decades since there had been any game shows regularly scheduled in prime time that Millionaire was a huge surprise hit for ABC. So much a surprise that they had no idea what to do about it. Since the shows could be cheaply produced and taped in less than a few days ABC soon had it airing several nights a week. While ABC was busy ruining their hit game show with overexposure other networks scrambled to have their own prime time game shows. For decades producers had been pitching game show formats based on popular shows from other countries where the ideas were wilder than what was seen on American television. To that date the few semi-crazy game shows produced in America were The Gong Show, The $1.98 Beauty Show ( both produced by Chuck Barris ), Beat the Clock and MTV's Remote Control. Television networks had long since moved their game shows to the afternoons and had assumed their target audience to be housewives who would not be into the craziness that was found on the foreign shows. One of those crazy shows which aired in Sweden was called Expedition Robinson in which 16 contestants were marooned on an island, attempt to survive as if they had been shipwrecked, and each week vote off one of the contestants. Producer Mark Bernett bought the rights to the show hoping it would make an interesting afternoon game show, part soap opera and part competition. CBS offered him a weekly prime time wednesday night slot instead.

Benett renamed the show Survivor and CBS immediately began over hyping it as the next prime time game show sensation. Each week after a contestant was voted off he/she was immediately booked as a guest on the CBS Morning Show followed by a guest appearance on David Letterman and then on to the Howard Stern Show. The hype worked and soon other talk shows not owned by CBS began booking the voted off contestants. With the show completely taped in advance producers knew the outcome and were able to edit the show in a way that concealed who the winner was. Any footage showing Richard Hatch look like a jerk and other contestants talking about how they wanted to vote him off was included in every weeks episodes to the point that viewers never expected him to win. Similarly producers deliberately never included any footage of contestants saying anything negative about runner up Kelly Wiglesworth to the point that viewers were completely surprised when during the final tribal council contestants mentioned how much they disliked her. The contestant everyone expected to win was Rudy Boesch who had originally surprised viewers by being the only elderly contestant not to be voted off in the early rounds, and would go on to be notorious for making politically incorrect statements. Rudy had early on formed an alliance between Richard Hatch, Kelly Wiglesworth and truck driver Susan Hawk who were able to make it to the final four. By the final episode the show had become such a phenomenon that the headline of newspapers everywhere was about how that night the winner of Survivor would be announced. The final show was very memorable. With everyone else voted off the four way alliance broke into two competing alliances, with Rudy and Richard forming an all male alliance and Kelly and Sue forming the female alliance. It all came down to the 13th tribal council which was a tie with two votes against Richard and two votes against Sue. The contestants were asked to vote again and during the second vote Kelly decided to break her alliance and vote against Susan. There was a final immunity challenge where whoever won would have the deciding vote as to who would join him/her in the final two. Early in the challenge, which was simply to be the contestant who holds onto a post the longest, Richard decided to let go confident that whoever won would chose him for the final two. Rudy let go by mistake and Kelly won, voting Rudy off because she felt she had a better chance winning against Richard. During the final tribal council contestants blasted both Richard and Kelly for being deceptive, the most memorable speech coming from Susan Hawk still pissed at Kelly voting her off and calling her a rat and Richard a snake. The final vote was a tie with the swing vote coming from former Pagong tribe member Greg Buis asking the two remaining contestants to pick a number between one and ten, the person who picked the closest number to the one he was thinking of getting his vote.

Although the outcome of the game had been filmed months in advance of the final episode producers were able to keep it a secret. Neither contestants nor crew members told anyone the show's outcome including their own family members. For a while it was rumored that the shows website had pictures of the contestants arranged in the order they were being voted off which turned out not to be the case. Tabloids began offering money for any inside information on the outcome of the game. By the final week producers began to worry that someone would speak, after all by now hundreds of people connected to the production of the show knew the outcome. The outcome was finally blown by the show's host Jeff Probst on the day the final episode was suppose to air. It was during the show "Live With Regis & Kathie Lee" where Jeff said that he could not reveal who won but would say that the person who did win nearly fainted prior to the winner being announced. The problem was that during the final Survivor episode Richard announces he feels faint two minutes prior to Jeff reading the final votes. Viewers who saw that episode of Live had the ending spoiled for them. In the second season Survivor: The Australian Outback tabloids made aggressive attempts to penetrate the set to find out which contestants were voted off. Producers were so worried that this time the outcome would be revealed that they decided the final vote would be read live on air. This last minute decision came as a surprise to contestants when Jeff announced that the results would be read on the live show then left the tribal council with votes locked in a box. For the third season producers came back from a commercial break to a set that looked exactly like the tribal council set but was in fact in front of a live audience. After Jeff read the votes and the winner Ethan Zohn was announced the audience who had been quiet broke out into applause as the house lights were turned on. This would be the only time Survivor tried to trick viewers into thinking the live show was part of the taped show.

With the success of Survivor came a flood of other reality based game shows. Some like American Idol were completely original concepts while others were direct ripoffs of the survivor format. The most interesting was a revival of Gilligan's Island where contestants portrayed characters from the classic sitcom but otherwise played a game that was similar to Survivor with castaways being voted off. Mark Bernett would go on to further success with The Apprentice but would also attempt to replicate his own Survivor knockoff called Pirate Master in the summer of 2007. The show turned out to be a huge flop and was cancelled weeks before the final episode forcing viewers to watch the remainder of the series online. The problem was that the rules of Pirate Master allowed a small alliance of game members to take over the game with no way of being voted off so that the final two were known weeks in advance from which it was easy to guess the show's winner. Almost immediately after the first season of Survivor aired there was talk about having a celebrity version. Many celebrities were rumored to have solicited CBS to be contestants in a celebrity version of the show. Inevitably CBS decided not to bother with a celebrity version realizing that most of them would have quit a third of the way through the season. To date the only existing celebrity Survivor was filmed by an Australian television network for that country. NBC produced their own version of celebrity Survivor called I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! where the celebrities were placed in a jungle but unlike Survivor were given cooked meals and were voted off not by tribe members but by phoned in votes from viewers. Predictably the celebrities threatened to walk off the show many times even though it was only scheduled for a two week shoot. The closest the American version of Survivor came to any celebrity episodes was inviting back former contestants for all star episodes.

Survivor hit it's peak with the first season which was so popular that it became the only season CBS aired in reruns. News of which contestant was voted off that week was worthy of newspaper headlines and the final episode dominated the front pages of newspapers everywhere. Destiny's Child quickly wrote the song Survivor which became a #2 chart hit for them. The first episode of the second season Survivor: The Australian Outback aired in the coveted spot following the Super Bowl and the season overall got a million more viewers than the first season. Survivor: Africa was scheduled to be the third season debuting in the fall of 2001. Its premiere was postponed several weeks because of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. America had changed. There was a general feeling that the country had been too consumed with the frivolous and had been ignoring world politics for too long. It was pointed out that the news was giving too much attention to entertainment stories. Survivor had dominated the news headlines in the day before and after its final episodes while Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda barely got any attention. The combination of news media ignoring the third season and America no longer being in the mood to celebrate resulted in lower hype and the loss of nearly ten million viewers. While the show has never regained the phenomenal popularity it had in 2000 and early 2001 it has still brought in enough viewers to remain a hit.