ENTERTAINMENT
How do competitive reality television viewers respond to race discussions embedded in these series?
My findings suggest very negatively
The Emmy award-winning competitive reality series Survivor introduces audiences to a group of between 16 to 20 contestants who travel to a remote location for six weeks to compete for a million-dollar cash prize.
Standing in between each castaway and the prize money are their fellow cast mates with whom they live as “tribe” members. Framed as a competition whose main objective is to “outwit, outplay, and outlast,” contestants must depend on one another to gather water and cook food while also participating in physical and mental competitions all while forging alliances to avoid being voted off the show by their peers.
Yet, only one person can win which means that coalitions that form will be tested and contestants will have to make hard choices that may pull at their core values and commitments. From this perspective, shows in this genre are a microcosm of civil society where both group dynamics and politics are continually at play.
In my recent article published in Political Communications titled, “Don’t Make My Entertainment Political! Social Media Responses to Narratives of Racial Duty on Competitive Reality Series” I use three recent episodes from Survivor 41 to study viewer reactions to Black contestants’ claims about the commitment or obligation they feel to positively represent their racial group and make decisions that advance other Black players when appearing on the show given their shared group-based marginalization in U.S. history. I refer to Black players’ expressions in this context as narratives of racial duty.
I designed this research study after racial events outside of the game acted as a catalyst for substantial changes in how the Survivor franchise is cast and produced. Filmed in April and May 2021, Season 41 was the first season to air following the 2020 racial uprisings in the United States sparked by the release of an 8-minute video capturing George Floyd, an unarmed African American man and Minneapolis resident, being murdered by a white police officer after being suspected of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a nearby convenience store.
As protestors flooded streets in cities across the United States to demand justice for Mr. Floyd and his family, former Black Survivor players organized the Survivor Diversity Campaign and simultaneously demanded racial justice in the entertainment and media world. The group demanded that CBS Entertainment Group, the producers of Survivor, Big Brother, and several other competitive reality series, commit to creating more diverse casts and more inclusive storytelling on the network and show franchise.
These efforts culminated in the CBS Entertainment Group pledging that at least half of their future competitive reality series casts would be made up of historically underrepresented social groups such as racial and ethnic, religious, sexual, and gender minorities. CBS executives also promised to be more inclusive in the development and production of storytelling in future seasons.
These new policies offer a fascinating context to observe responses to storytelling about race and racial progress in the U.S. context inside entertainment programs. Drawing on previous work by communications scholars that has found that the depiction of social issues on television can influence how individuals perceive the world around them, I argued that competitive reality series like Survivor are a heretofore underexplored site for studying the transmission of racial narratives to ostensibly unsuspecting television audiences.
For the study, I collected 3,386 tweets reacting to three Season 41 episodes and manually reviewed each tweet to assess whether it was reacting to racial and gender-motivated reasoning and/or decision making by Black Survivor contestants. I then hand coded 835 tweets that directly responded to claims made by Black players during each episode. My goal was to identify prevalent themes in viewers’ reactions and assess whether these responses seemed to be primarily neutral, positive, negative, or mixed in their overall tone.
Overall, I identified 80 distinct themes in viewers’ reactions to narratives of racial duty expressed by Black players. The figure below summarizes the five most common themes that emerged in the analysis:
(1) Survivor has become too political
(2) Loved this conversation
(3) Done watching Survivor
(4) Double standard
(5) Race-based alliance is racist
As this figure indicates, viewers most frequently responded negatively to these episodes when posting reactions on Twitter. In fact, four of the five most prevalent themes that emerged in tweets were negative.
Most commonly, viewers reported that the show had become too political. They wrote that the show was “all about race” and lamented that “Survivor going woke is a tragedy.”
In other instances, viewers vowed that they were done watching the show and sarcastically dubbed the new Survivor era “Woke Survivor” and revised the show’s tagline to “outwit, outplay, outwoke.”
Other audience members pointed out that openly discussing a gameplay strategy based on race would get white players “cancelled” whereas Black players were being celebrated — what they perceived to be a double standard.
Finally, viewers described the Black players’ attempt to form an all-Black alliance as “overtly racist” and referred to the attempts to diversify the cast as hypocritical if the language of diversity was now being used to increase Black players’ power inside the game.
Importantly, there were also Survivor fans who reported that they “loved the conversation.” However, these more positive responses were far less common. This theme was applied to a meager 10% of tweets analyzed in the study whereas the remaining, more negative reactions were applied to nearly half (44%) of the tweets I hand coded in the study.
These findings suggest that broadcasting exemplars who challenge prevailing narratives of racial progress may stoke feelings of racial backlash that could ultimately prompt individuals to tune out of these entertainment programs at best, and stoke racial discord at worst. While these findings don’t paint a rosy picture of reactions to discussions of race and racial progress, they are important to understand as we move forward and efforts to mobilize around the mission of racial equity and greater inclusivity continue to build momentum and make demands of U.S. elected officials and the broader political system.
