 Time to Kick Survivor Off the Island?
We don’t have TV at our house. We do have a television, and a DVD player, and NetFlix account, but not TV per se. Because TV sucks, and in its present form, we’d all be better off without it. I know my kids are.
But I’m hopeless – despite having no direct pipeline to the Blue Death, I still manage to absorb a fair amount of popular culture through waiting-room magazines, simple osmosis, and stupid conversations. One of these unavoidable phenoms is reality TV – easily the most mis-directed oxymoron out there, next to Islamo-Fascism. The only thing real about reality TV is the unrequited recognition that its participants crave. The surreality of a bunch of middle-class humps voluntarily stranding themselves on a desert island for the pleasure of eating bugs, or couples swapping spouses for everything except sex, makes me wonder just who the hell I’m sharing the country with.
The big daddy of the reality oeuvre, “Survivor,” wasn’t necessarily the worst of the lot until this season’s race-based theme that groups Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and Asians into teams – “tribes” in the show’s parlance – pitting them against one another to perform meaningless, often degrading “challenges,” all the while urging them to plot against their teammates for the million dollar prize. Maybe for some people that’s a working metaphor for reality, and maybe that’s the problem.
We don’t have to speculate about what this pin-headed idea will bring – we already live it – and if reality is any indicator, it won’t be edifying. Rush Limbaugh says the African-American team will be at a disadvantage in the swimming competition. And while he might be joking, that’s the perspective his listeners and many others – whoever they’re rooting for – will bring to it. Even if the white boys win the coconut tree-climbing race, and the brothers successfully determine their exact position on the globe with a bamboo telescope and an abacus made of seashells, no matter who “wins,” in the end, viewers with deep-seated prejudices will see them reinforced.
Maybe Mark Burnett, the series’ producer, holds the lofty notion that this season’s “Survivor” will effectively challenge widely held stereotypes. If so, he should ask himself if his other equally inane offering, “The Apprentice,” did anything to dispel the belief that Donald Trump is an insufferable prick.
If Burnett wants to break teams up into identifiable sub-sets that their constituent groups in TV land can identify with, why not use a class division? At least that’s real. How about loggers and carpenters and Fed-Ex drivers against the idiot sons of the idle rich? Or let’s get really granular and put up a tribe of gay firefighters against a congregation of fundamentalist Christian investment bankers. I’d get even cable for that, and sit my family down in front of it every week to watch.
~Jack McEnany
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