....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I'm not sure I can survive a week without "Survivor." Can you survive? I guess we'll soon find out. This week the United States of America begins its first week of "Survivor" withdrawal.
Now we must ask deep, fundamental questions about the foundations of our entire culture. Questions like: what is the value in a week without watching skinny people in swimsuits on a heavy fruit diet, eating rats and rays for protein? Where is the interest in a week without the tantalizing mystery of who will be voted out, who will be thrown off the island? What fun can there be in a week without the increasingly unsubtle product tie-ins? Where is the nobility in a week without Rudy?
We have been for the last two months a nation strung out on a theme song nobody knows the words to. (Obie Yah, A-yah, Kobie Mobie rue ish-nue. Obie wan Kanobie Yani momie bobie moo"?) We have debated the comparative values of razors and tic tack as "personal luxury items". We have argued with friends and strangers over who did the most work, who was the most valuable, who was the most duplicitous, and formed deeply held opinions of people we have never met based on viewing 53 edited minutes from a 72 hour period concerning events that happened six months ago and ten thousand miles away in an artificially produced and manipulated environment.
But it was exciting, wasn't it? And now its over. The end has come. The tide of network programing guidelines have washed away all the effort, all the arguments, and all the immunity challenges. One sturdy soul has won a million dollars, but the only long term winner is going to be the Internal Revenue Service. And maybe CBS, which needed this hit show badly.
Sixteen Robinson Crusoes they were called, and they were; if he had been deposited by the Queen Mary on Miami Beach. They were not only not stranded, they had no privacy. They not only didn't have to struggle to live, they had energy to waste on games.
One of the first losers to appear on a CBS talk show confessed she was amazed the show looked so good, given that the "survivors" actually spent most of their time each day sleeping and sucking on fruit. And yet the product is still called Reality TV, which is like calling Rube Paul a darned attractive woman - which he is but then again he isn't.
Each tribe of survivors was accompanied by a complete film crew, (camera, sound, gaffer and director), twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Was there a chance they were going to wander off into the jungle and fall victim to head hunters? Was there a remote possibility that a passing typhoon would sweep them into the sea? Was there the slightest risk they would break a leg, or be attacked by a monkey or a snake? Of course not. That was not in the script.
The entire "adventure" was carefully designed and monitored by psychiatrists, behavior therapists, corporate motivational experts, and people who knew how to splice film together in such a way as to make a casual meeting between two friends look like a life and death struggle on the beach. It was manipulation on levels Freud never dreamed of.
And I loved it. And so did you. We tuned in week, after week, after week, after week. And now there is nothing to tune into. "Who wants to be a Millionaire" seems tame by comparison. "Big Brother" looks banal and slimy. And I fear "ER" is going to look artificial, too.
So what will post-Survivor TV look like? How about throwing twenty-two actors and some horses onto a back lot and see if they can ad-lib a western? How about a murder mystery in which the mystery is who is going to be murdered, actually murdered, in the final episode? Or a show called "Sex", in which the cast has round-robin encounters and after each round votes to eliminate those who disappointed.
You can bet some network executive is considering these ideas, or ones very close to them, at this very minute. That is the real Reality TV.
And if they put it on the air, I would watch it. And so would you.
Kimit Muston is a writer living in North Hollywood. He can be contacted about his column at Inditer dot com.