The Alphabet Strategy From A to Z

A History of Sean Kenniff and his alphabet strategy

With the Survivor: Borneo finale having aired 20 years ago yesterday, I have deemed this week to be Survivor: Borneo week. All articles coming out on A Tribe of One for the week of August 23, 2020 will be related to Survivor’s iconic first season to celebrate 20 years of Survivor discussion.

Nowadays, strategy and Survivor go together like peanut butter and jelly. We live in a world where there is more podcast and written analysis of that week’s Survivor episode than there is time devoted to that episode by CBS. Any episode of Survivor will spawn dozens of hours of content on the internet. First and foremost, Survivor is seen as a gameshow where people will willingly get castaway’ed for the chance to win a million dollars.

In 2000, it was an entirely different story. Survivor hadn’t yet been on the airwaves and Mark Burnett was trying to put together its first ever cast. They did so by putting out casting calls and radio advertisements around the United States. According to Lynne Spillman, who was part of casting Survivor’s first 38 seasons, they received around 2,000 applicants for the first season, much lower than one might expect.

One of those applicants was Sean Kenniff. He was a 30 year old Neurologist from New York but he was tired of the medical field. He saw Survivor as an opportunity to branch away from his profession and possibly find a gig in the entertainment world. Sean told EW as much in his exit interview after the season.

Actually, I stopped practicing last October because I was frustrated with the medical world. Neurology is a fascinating field, but I wanted to do more. I write, I wanted to get into television, I wanted to try new things.

You probably remember Sean on Survivor: Borneo for a few reasons: his nipple ring (legitimately a talking point back then, now a weird memory from my childhood), the super pole 2000 (it was trendy at the time to call a thing “so and so 2000” don’t blame the guy for his lack of originality) and the alphabet strategy.

As players were sent into Borneo without any precedent, each player had to assess how they wanted to play the game and how they wanted to be portrayed. Was winning the million dollar the only objective? For someone like Richard Hatch, the answer was, “yes, of course”. Other players were juggling other feelings. Like how they would be seen by the audience, with the knowledge that Survivor was going to be aired on a network like CBS. Sean was one of those players who had a lot to gain from being portrayed in a positive light.

Simply as a doctor, Sean was unwilling to be seen as the bad guy. In his mind, it would have been uncouth for the guy you trust with your life to be on a television show cutting people’s throats. That kind of edit would have a direct impact on his profitability as a surgeon if he chose to go back to his field. As an aspiring writer and comedian, he was also more focused on coming off as comic relief and not as a Machiavellian character whose presence would be unwelcome on the friendly airwaves of sitcom television.

On top of that, as Sean told Martin Holmes of Inside Survivor in Holmes’ excellent oral history of Survivor’s first season, Sean was unwilling to be a bad guy based on his own moral compass.

I was not willing to be the “bad guy.” I’m still not willing. I live by the adage, “It’s always the right time to do the right thing.” My father taught me that. I do this even when it’s hard, even when it’s on a reality show. That may sound naïve, but that’s how I live. I played the game the way I wanted.

This created a perfect storm for a person who was in a position of trust in the real world, wanted to break through the entertainment industry as a lovable goof and felt in his soul that he could not mistreat people. That person still wanted to be successful on this show where betrayal quickly became a necessary evil to success. This is how the alphabet strategy came into being.

Rather than vote out people based on how he felt, once the players reached the merge, Sean decided he was going to vote people out based on their first names alphabetically. This would absolve him of any blame because he was voting based off a pre-determined and acknowledged concept.

But the fact that his strategy was both pre-determined and known to everyone else came to be his downfall. Sean wasn’t willing to engage in alliance building and group voting, but the rest of his tribe was. Sean hailed from the Tagi tribe and in that camp, the Tagi Four alliance had risen to power. Richard, Susan Hawk, Kelly Wigglesworth and Rudy Boesch had formed an alliance that agreed to vote together, hoping to get to the end with their power in numbers. And they knew Sean’s voting plan for the post-merge.

Because the alliance knew where Sean was voting each round, it became easy for them to work around his votes. When it didn’t matter, like when Gretchen was voted out, the alliance simply let Sean be. When the alliance felt like they might need Sean’s vote, they would tagalong on whatever name Sean was getting to on his list. In that sense, Sean became the unofficial fifth member of the Tagi alliance.

For Sean, that was something he desperately did not want. He figured, correctly, that the audience would highly dislike people banding together and forming an alliance. It was seen as poor sportsmanship for these “less deserving” players to get together and to vote out the people that “deserved” to go far, like Gretchen or Colleen. This is exactly how the audience viewed Survivor: Borneo at the time. Strategy wasn’t the focus, the personalities were and suddenly, Sean was being lumped into an alliance he was trying to hard to avoid.

Sean was trying so hard to avoid being the bad guy that he somehow stumbled his way into becoming the bad guy. At the final eight, a final opportunity presented itself for the Tagi alliance to be destroyed. At this point, Kelly had become disillusioned with the alliance, believing like Sean that it was an unethical way to play Survivor. She decided that from that point on, she would vote how she felt like voting. The rest of the Tagi alliance noticed Kelly drifting, highlighted by a Rudy confessional the deserves to be mentioned,

I thought about a female alliance and watching them, the way they walk around, hand in hand. I even thought about lesbianism, but, uh, maybe not. I don’t know. And, uh, it could happen if they had any brains, but I don’t think they got enough brains to do that.

Oh Rudy… we miss you.

With three Pagongs left in the game, Gervase, Jenna and Colleen, and Kelly voting rogue, that meant that Sean suddenly found himself in a swing vote position. He could vote for Jenna, as that was the person he was at on his alphabetical list, or he could join Pagong and vote for Richard and send him out of the game.

Pagong tried desperately to reach Sean and make him see that there was an alliance working behind him and that they would be throwing their votes on Jenna to use his alphabetical vote as the clincher but per the edit, Sean just dug his head in the sand.

I’m going in alphabetical order — Jenna is next. It would make me happy if Gervase does not win Immunity this time ’cause I had to skip him last time — you know, I skipped him in the order — and maybe Jenna will win it and get out of the order.

The episodes really push that Sean doesn’t see the Tagi alliance. The edit will have you believe that this man is genuinely clueless in what is going on around him. Especially in Jenna’s boot episode, where all of Sean’s content is related to talking about the alphabet strategy.

The way I figure it, like, my vote is gonna go alphabetical, okay? Today’s Jenna. If I’m gonna be the swing vote… which I don’t think I will be… then I won’t vote for her, obviously.

He talks about it at tribal council too.

Jenna knows. She wouldn’t take it personally. And I think she’s a safe vote tonight. If I felt she was in jeopardy I would think twice, at the very least, in casting my vote.

And while voting for Jenna,

Continuing my alphabetic strategy, Jenna, you know I love you, no offense to this. I hope you don’t get voted off. I don’t think… you might have one vote or two votes or something like that but nothing major, I don’t think. I hope.

So, Sean is an idiot, right? Surely, the alphabet strategy is the stupidest way to play this game we’ve ever seen. Borneo’s edit certainly goes to great lengths to show us how stupid Sean was about this whole thing. Well, not so fast, according to Sean anyways. This is what he had to say to EW in his exit interview about the alphabet strategy.

It was very well thought out and a good strategy. It certainly wasn’t a numskull idea. Once people think about it, they’ll understand what I was trying to do. The trick was that on face value, it needed to appear as a harmless strategy. But it wasn’t harmless. It was just a strategy.

The theory going around became that Sean had to know what he was doing. There’s no way he couldn’t see that an alliance had formed in his tribe. Because Pagong’s names were alphabetically first, it became theorized that Sean purposefully started using this strategy at the merge (he voted the way he wanted to during Tagi’s tribal councils without using the alphabet) to appear like he was just voting on a randomly chosen factor but was in fact, voting with the alliance.

In 2018, Sean had an appearance on Rob Has A Podcast where he confirmed that theory and gave his extended (and I mean extended) thoughts on why it would work for him.

It was coordinated. I knew, contrary to what you see on TV, ‘oh maybe they’re all aligned’, I knew exactly what was going on with them. But again, getting to the producers being sort of like the third wheel here, you could sort of figure out what’s going on and I knew I couldn’t explain my strategy with the alphabet strategy because I feared they would go and say something to the other team. But what I noticed is, and how it would be, like I said, the producers don’t control the show, but they steer the show. Every reality series. I’m a big fan of the Bachelor series thanks to my wife. 85, 86% of the show, of any reality television show, is a direct response to producer questions. So, they’re like, ‘hey Rob! Come talk to us in the woods over here.’ And they set you up in the woods and ask you questions, ‘what’s going with this person? What’s going on with that person? And what do you think about this?’ And what I feared, when I came up with the alphabet strategy was the producers were like, ‘so do you think Sean was just being a neutral, nice guy or do you think it’s actually because of this?’ Right? I knew that that question could come up and I didn’t want my cover blown. But what I noticed, is that my team was all older but also at the back of the alphabet. So, after the merger, I had Rich, Rudy, Sue and Kelly… and me, I’m Sean, with an S. So, we’re all the backend of the alphabet whereas the other team, the Pagong tribe, was Gervase, Jenna, Colleen, Gretchen and Greg. They were all at the front of the alphabet. And that was not by coincidence. I really think that when they stratified the teams, they were like alright, we can’t have all the young kids on one team, let’s give the older team Dirk. You know? That’s really what I thought they did. They just switched two people. But that’s the way it went down so I noticed they were all at the front of the alphabet and I knew there was an alliance. So, you want to win a million dollars from the jury. So, what I would figure was like ‘listen, I’m gonna be impartial. I’m just gonna vote and be vocal about it, I’m, gonna vote alphabetical order and, I’m gonna go by the name your mom gave you. You know, not that I gave you, it’s not my fault’. And hopefully people, if they knew who I was voting for, by alphabetical order, they woulds say, ‘hey, I’m gonna throw my vote on that person to eliminate the competition’. So, from a mathematical point of view, it made sense. And then also knowing that Rich, Rudy, Sue and Kelly were going to be voting in a bloc, then I also knew at that point that, wait a minute they’re voting in a bloc, I get to look, if I make it to the very end, then I look impartial to the jury because I was just voting in alphabetical order. I’m not part of the evil alliance and on top of that, I still got to vote for the entire other team. Gervase, Jenna, Colleen, Gretchen and Greg, before I would have to vote for anybody on the alliance. So, they would know that they’re far down the alphabet, so they would feel less threatened by me. That was my thinking out there the whole time. But I couldn’t say that. A) it would probably bore everybody to death, but I also feared that if I told anybody that, then they would go, and the producer would be like, ‘do you think Sean is just being a nice guy? And impartial? Or do you think it’s coincidence that, you know Gervase, Jenna, Colleen, Gretchen and Greg are all at the front of the alphabet? That he gets to vote your team out before his own.’ Yeah, so I didn’t want anything like that to ruin my game plan. So, you just have to know, that’s what it was. But I mean listen, if everyone wants to go on and on and call me a numbskull for doing what I did, that’s absolutely fine. I was being real out there. That’s the real strategy behind it. I was trying to win a million dollars the best way I know how because I mortgaged my future to become a doctor and you know, I had to pay off my student loans. I mean, that’s the way it is. And that’s what I was trying to do. To me, if I could do it all again, the one thing I would change about that alphabet strategy is that I would have stuck with it. I abandoned it at some point because Rich, Rudy, Sue and Kelly would say, ‘we’re gonna vote you out next if you vote for whoever it was’, I forget who. But they were gonna vote me out next so I had to unless I abandoned the alphabet thing. But had I stuck with it, I think maybe I would have won. But you never know.

The thing about Sean’s explanation is that the “some point” he describes in that quote is after the Jenna vote. Once Jenna leaves, Sean abandons the alphabet strategy and full on just votes with the alliance. So, at that point, he’s come off wishy-washy by refusing to commit to voting on principles, using the alphabet as a shallow cloak, and when that cloak comes off, he decides to try and join the Tagi alliance he was so desperately trying to avoid being thrown into.

I have no problem buying that Sean understood that by using the alphabet, he was committing to voting with the Tagi alliance without verbalizing that. I just bristle with the idea that it was some sort of high-level move that would have gained him favors with the jury. If anything, Pagong was more pissed at him than the alliance because Sean had the power to flip the script and stuck with his strategy. Even if Sean understood what Tagi was doing, he was pretending to Pagong that he didn’t and in the process, came off looking like an idiot. They wouldn’t have respected him if he had gotten to the end using that strategy, they would have felt like he was the one that doomed them the most.

Given that Sean got to watch the Survivor: Borneo episodes before publicly talking about the alphabet strategy, we have to take everything he says with a grain of salt. Did Sean really come up with the alphabet strategy as a way to cloak in plain sight? Did he actually see what was going on around him on Tagi? We’ll never fully know.

It is believable that Sean was out to protect his reputation. His stint on Survivor led to a four-part appearance on the soap opera, Guiding Light and an episode of Nash Bridges. Sean genuinely had plans to parlay his Survivor stint into TV stardom. In that sense, I can see that Sean would come up with a way to vote that would absolve him of any kind of subjective voting that could lead to some criticism by the audience.

In that same length, I don’t believe that Sean thought about this strategy to the extent that he describes it after the show. That became conveniently available to him as fans started talking about what the hell Sean could have been thinking. I think he latched onto what was already in the ether, stuck to his script in post-game interviews and has held onto the same lines for 20 years. After all, Sean wanted to be an actor, how hard would it be for him to remember a couple of lines?

Twenty years into the future, we’ll never really know Sean’s true intentions at the Borneo merge. Whether you buy the show or Sean’s explanation is up to you. For me, like most everything in life, it seems like the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I just know that Survivor: Borneo will forever be the only season that could allow for something like that alphabet strategy to exist and it’s one of a thousand reasons why I will adore that season until my dying days.