I have watched each season of Survivor multiple times. I write pretty much daily about Survivor be it on this site, twitter, or Reddit. I consider myself to be very knowledgeable about the show and its strategy. The thing is, I know nothing about Survivor and I am far from the only one in this situation.
The biggest fallacy we tell ourselves as fans of the show is that we understand what goes on during a season by watching the episodes. Think about it, each season is 39 days. That’s 936 hours of gameplay for a minimum of two people. Of those 936 hours, the audience gets to see 15 or 16 hours of footage. That amounts to less than 2% of any given season. Think about trying to condense everything you did over the last month of your life into a 2/3rds of a day, how accurate a portrayal would that be (for some, a little too accurate probably)?
Once you get past the idea that you’re only seeing a miniscule part of what actually went on during those 39 days you also have to realize that even that portrayal will be slanted. On any season you will have between 16 to 20 contestants vying for the title of sole survivor and few can make it to the end. It’s in the editors’ best interest to have those people that get far be somebody the audience can get behind. So if you have a player who played very well for 30 days but finishes 7th or 8th, you can bet that most of their moves will not be shown on the show. Instead the attention will be focused on the good things that the players who went farther did.
There are plenty of examples of this throughout the show’s run. The most egregious being Survivor: Samoa where the second place finisher, Russell Hantz, received a startling amount of air time. Just looking at the confessional count tells the story, Russell got 108 over the course of the season. The next highest was Shambo with 39. I don’t think I need to tell you how absurdly slanted that number is. Other than Russell, the only jurors to get a confessional in each episode they appeared in were Mick and Monica, not exactly memorable.
Because of how Samoa is edited, one would think that Russell was the only out there making moves. Almost every boot revolves around how Russell is going to get this person out. “Insert young female said she didn’t trust me. How stupid is that? She is goooooooone! Russell gets what Russell wants!” It’s easy to think that Russell was the standout player of the season when he was the only one being highlighted but look behind the scenes and people will tell you differently. Others were playing and making moves, the editors just didn’t put it in because it didn’t fit in the narrative that they wanted to tell.
In his amazing Reddit AMA that every Survivor fan should take the time to read, Danger Dave Ball wrote about this in great detail.
Turns out I was the one who got Erik voted off. Kelly and I were having a convo in the bushes sans cameras (because by that point I didn’t trust production) and I lined out to Kel why E had to go. When Nat showed up to swing the ladies, Kel was already on board and she just told Laura what I’d told her (which was E was playing Galu against itself) and it was a done deal. Production had to show Nat “making a move” so she was seen as a player and also because they didn’t have footage of me selling Kel on the E blindside. Nat just showed up and said “Hey y’all! Erik’s acting funny!” But I’d been looking to burn him for a week. He was shady. Funny because Brett was my number one alliance and right before tribal he tried to talk me out of it. Should have listened. But like I say your brain is fried out there. All the time. (In my defense, camp was a dramatic shitshow with Monica and Fincher constantly running back and forth in terror that the other one was going to organize some sort of coup against the other while the rest of us were constantly befuddled as to why they would think that considering I’d never heard anything of the like from either of them. Turns out Erik was Grima Wormtounging the both of them. After his blindside the camp was fucking BLISS. So quiet and peaceful for a week (Until Galu fell the fuck apart. :/ Because Erik was the only thing keeping Shambo’s psycho genie in the bottle. Once he was gone so was the last bit of her sanity and composure. After that it was nothing but boiling chickens for three hours, like any brilliant chef, and nocturnal visitations from the Almighty for the purpose of delivering erroneous portents regarding the blindsiding of yours truly.)
Because the editors had already decided Russell was going to be the focus, much of the Galu inner workings were not even shown. Outside of Russell Swan nearly dying and the Shambo/Laura Morett feud, we got nearly nothing from them. Dave also pointed out that he had a tight alliance with Brett and they were final two all the way but we don’t even get any indication that they were all that close from the episodes.
On the subject of players giving their own thoughts on their season, they can also be unreliable too. Whereas Dave clearly believes he was the catalyst for the tribe to flip on Erik, in her own AMA, Monica Padilla directly contradicts him and states that Natalie was the one who caused them to flip. This is just further proof that even the players involved with the season don’t know the real story and can only tell you their own version of it.
In a way, putting so much focus on Russell also hurt the season. When fans talk about “worst winners ever” Natalie White is one of the first names brought up. Was she the most strategic person to ever win Survivor? Absolutely not but she made some smart decisions. She saw Russell as someone she could align with who would accumulate all the blood on his hands. She was nice to everybody and was helpful around camp. She was unassuming but part of her alliance’s core decision making. She played a very straight forward game but we got to see almost none of it on screen. Instead we got Russell looking for idols and telling us that he’s the best of all-time so naturally, when he loses to what the audience is shown as a non-entity, a lot of them are going to be mad about it.
The same thing happened in South Pacific. You had Coach Wade as the figurehead of the Upolu Family alliance, cutting all the confessionals and being shown making most of the decisions. In the background, Sophie Clarke letting Coach basically hang himself while he was running back to her and consulting her on pretty much all of his decisions. She had as much to do with the boot order of the season than Coach did and she won because she presented her case much better at final tribal council but got none of the credit on television.
Of course a person like Coach is going to get the lion’s share of the air time because he is born to be in front of a camera. He gives some of the best quotes and generally knows how to work a scene. When he comes up with a narrative, he knows how to drive it home for the producers better than anybody else on Survivor. It’s why he’s so appealing as a television character. That said, by focusing so much on him, the editors are really hurting the overall quality of their season by not giving their winner enough credit for the game moves she was making.
Besides telling the story they want to tell instead of the one that truly unfolded, the producers will also go a long to protect their winners as much as possible. Think back to Survivor: Gabon (which featured the original Russell in terms of airtime, Sugar Kiper) and its winner, Bob Crowley. The audience probably remembers Bob, if they remember him at all, as a sweet old man who won a lot of competitions and won by being a nice guy sitting next to two people the jury didn’t like. I can’t blame you for remembering him like that because that’s how he was edited. In reality if you look at interviews from the post-game, Crystal Cox, Corinne Kaplan and Kenny Hoang have all said that Bob… liked to get a little handsy with some of the women at night. Now one might understand why this would never make the edited version of the show, knowing Bob may have also been a bit of a pervert would certainly alter your perspective on him, right?
Knowing everything that goes with making a television product, I can never call myself a Survivor expert. I am simply someone who has memorized what happens during the course of any given season and can give the storyline that was created for each of them. I don’t know what truly happened out on the island and I can never know. The only people who can say for sure are the ones who were playing the game and the people who filmed it. Even the contestants are never going to get the full picture because they only see things from their perspective and get the edited perspective of the other players when they watch their season.
None of this should dissuade you from watching Survivor, talking about its strategy or trying to understand how a season went down. It should just be in the back of your head whenever you are sitting down watching the show, criticizing a player for doing X when they should have done Y. Maybe the person tried both but the results from doing X was better for the edited program than from doing Y. Don’t let that stop you from forming opinions about players and seasons but do consider it when you want to go on twitter and yell at them for making dumb choices. After all, I can probably pull 2% of footage from your last month to make you look like an ass too.
