Survivor (and other reality competitions)

No seriously Survivor's really good I swear.

May 31st, 2020 is going to be the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Survivor, and I really want to drive home just how big and influential the show was at the time. Like, it absolutely exploded in popularity. Season 1 gathered new viewers on a regular basis, and the finale was watched by 51.7 million viewers. That's thirteen episodes, at an episode per week, to gather that many people. To put that in context, the biggest television show in recent years was Game of Thrones, which gathered 19.3 million viewers at its peak with the finale. Before that was LOST, which pulled 23.5 million at its peak. Like, seriously, Survivor was huge, and while its popularity faded nearly as quickly, its impact can't be overstated.

So with that all in mind, what made the show, and continues to make the show so great?

Well, largely because there are a ton of different angles to approach it from. There's the game theory on how to progress through a game of "majority rules." There's the political theory, on how to progress through a game that requires social capital to succeed. There's how the metagame has evolved over the years in response to those things. There's how real events are edited to create a narrative, as well as how the events depicted maybe aren't as real as we're being led to believe. There's normal people from different walks of life meeting people they never would have otherwise encountered. There's a community based around spoilers, as well as an unspoiled community that uses a complex system called "edgic," which uses categorization and math to predict the winner based on past trends. And of course, there are people who like it for the adventure aspect, or the challenges the contestants compete in.

Basically, it's a show with very broad appeal, and this thread is a place to discuss it, as well as less high-profile shows like Big Brother, The Mole, The Apprentice, etc.

I watch this show for the blindsides.

Watching the first seasons' opening ep recently in the stream was certainly a trip down memory lane. Especially in terms of seeing how different it was from the bits current modern Survivor that I've caught on TV these days, especially in terms of how this season was shot and just it's mood.

Yeah, it's insane how night and day the earlier seasons are from the later seasons. The early seasons just have so much more heart since they're not focused on sensationalizing and strategy.