I've only had 45 minutes of sleep, but I had to watch the Survivor finale and reunion show before going to bed. I'm not even tired yet, cause Survivor stiiimulates the brain cells. I don't know how people can knock this show, who have never watched a season starting from day 1. There is nothing like it on television, and certainly no sporting event like in real life, that I know of.
Because it's all driven by people, and people are fantastically unpredictable--which is why one of the common debates in the social sciences is whether they can really be called a science at all. That's why political scientists are shite at making predictions. It's like the name of the short story, The Most Dangerous Game (that is, hunting human beings.)
So to make for a good people watching game, you just have to deprive everyone, give them a goal worth fighting for, and then set a few rules that work in contradiction to each other. And the result will be massively suspenseful.
Of the Survivors I've watched, not one has ever been predictable. People make DUMB moves that make you jump up and down on your couch out of shock. You never see the dumb moves coming. People make really great strategic moves, but you never know if they'll work out or not. And you can play the best game in terms of the physical and mental (winning challenges), in terms of making strong alliances, and in terms of lying and manipulating people, but there's that ONE last part of the game that you still have to consider, which is that the people you backstabbed will get to decide in the end whether you get the money or not.
There are a lot of Survivor fans (including the guy who was the runner up the last two seasons) who think the winner should be the person who strategized the best, but the fact is if you didn't strategize with the jury in mind, then you didn't strategize well enough--which is why a couple of the cleverest players have never won. And if you tried to make the game without that element, it wouldn't be as fun, because it would only favor the snakes, so it's a key part of the enjoyment.
Ahhh Survivor. This is why when I want to avoid TV, I just don't watch the first few episodes. Once the game's gone far enough into the season, it's too hard to understand, so it's easy to resist. This season sucked me in! But at least it was a goodie.
Guess I'd better get some sleeps now.
1 comment:
I've never watched, but I knock the show based on the commercials: I think it's silly how they go to remote parts of the globe and exoticize them with stuff like a totem pole.
Also, I could care less whether or not some reality TV star wins a million dollars (which, by the way, is not even that much in the world of reality TV these days... I'd be happy to have it, sure, but have they even raised the stakes after all these years?).
Anyway... I prefer scripted shows. I do.
But, well, in all honesty... Okay, so during the writer's strike, I may have watched some embarrassingly bad reality TV... I mean, it was impossible *not* to get sucked into Rock of Love because Brett Michaels (whose name I didn't even know before the show) was so ridiculously *earnest* about the whole thing. I mean, he'd be making out with ten platinum blond twentysomethings with fake tits in the course of an episode, and then start waxing poetic about how he was just some poor schmuck looking to make a real connection at the end of the day. And he was *believably* crushed every time he found out the girl he was connecting with was really just there to advance her porn career rather than being "there for him." And it could even be a little bit *endearing* how excited he was about these particular women (traditional beauties of American television they were not). I dunno... It was entertaining for the same reasons that Martin Bashir's Michael Jackson documentary was entertaining--the whole can't-take-your-eyes-off-the-trainwreck aspect of it. Which probably makes me overly identified with the worst parts of American TV culture, maybe.
Mostly, though, I can't get into Survivor.
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