Hacker Cinema
Survivor
2000 · TV series · 51 seasons
Created by Charlie Parsons, Mark Burnett
A reality show contest where sixteen or more castaways split between two or more “Tribes” are taken to a remote isolated location and are forced to live off the land with meager supplies for roughly 39 days. Frequent physical challenges are used to pit the tribes against each other for rewards, such as food or luxuries, or for “Immunity”, forcing the other tribe to attend “Tribal Council”, where they must vote off one of their players.
6 negative1 mixed31 neutralfrom 38 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
41 comments on Hacker News
Indeed. And with AI and video generation, it's now (or within months) literally undetectable. The closer we get to US midterms, the more we'll see how bad it really can get this time around.
And the US elections in 2028? I can barely imagine.
And the massive problem is, most people I talk to still think what they see on youtube is real. But of course, people thought the TV show Survivor was real, too. It's not a new phenomenon.
But it is at crazy levels. I like your 'denial of service' designation, because even knowing the problem, maybe you can't find real info still.
There was a contestant on a recent season of Survivor who, iirc, gave up on a challenge because the host said it would take "several hours" to finish. Later the contestant explained that "last I checked several means seven", and about an hour into the challenge he realized he wouldn't last for seven hours, so he quit.. (When the host said "several hours" I believe he meant about 4 hours)
This of course led to much ridicule and many memes in the fandom, and Survivor even titled the seventh episode of that season "Episode Several". In post-season interviews the contestant is still adamant that several means seven.
No condescension intended. I think I understand the appeal, in the same way I understand Jack London stories, Joseph Conrad novels, Survivor, Fight Club, and that bear movie guy. We’re too civilized, we’re hothouse flowers, and a little danger makes you feel alive. Especially if you are raised with traditional masculine values.
If you could have the same solitude, sweeping views, natural beauty, cameraderie, etc., but without real danger, would it have the same appeal?
This is fun, like the tv show survivor. Cool idea! There should be more experiments like this with different games. Well done.
It occurred to me that backstabbing is a common tactic of war historically, and increasingly of a certain group of power-seeking individuals specifically. A trait that The Apprentice and it's similar ilk of reality TV shows like Survivor invariably promoted.
My comment today on a YT video;
"Trump never apologizes or shows contrition (Roy Cohn's 'always deny' doctrine) as it shows weakness, similar to Putin perceiving appeasement as weakness. He then sets up a scenario (he called it "great television") where he expects Zelenskyy to apologize and say thankyou for the 100th time. He told Zelenskyy he had no cards, so apologizing or showing appreciation-on-demand (for nothing in exchange) would be submitting to being a loser in Trump's own mindset, which is the point of the whole fake deal on offer. No different to the "deal" he made with Afghan government for natural resources, before he sided with the Taliban to withdraw US troops in betrayal of that very agreement. When Zelenskyy pointed out that Putin can't be trusted for any ceasefire, Trump then raised his voice cos his own betrayals (nearly everyone who worked for him that wasn't paid, or went to prison by following instructions, or was summarily fired as per his catchphrase) are viewed as his favorite playing card."
Treachery has been his default modus operandi throughout his personal life (cheating and divorce) as well as in business and politics ("hang Mike Pence"). Reality TV then normalized it to the level of mass-entertainment as he suggested.
I like "Hi Team". I do use that in certain social circles, but I do get the point of the article.
Survivor, the US TV show, used to say "Come on in guys" until recently where they made a point to discuss the topic on camera with the contestants. There was a variety of opinions, but they ultimately settled on "Come on in." which conveys the point in a neutral tone.
Yeah I just don't understand how paramount+ is so bad. I've unsubscribed but I got it to watch a tv show on a plane, and so downloaded it onto my phone. The app would NOT play the video on the plane. At first I thought for some reason it needed to connect to the internet. Then after landing it wouldn't play even with the internet.
Then there's the chromecast app. I want to watch an episode of survivor, a show with 45 seasons now. Apparently it just loads all the episode data for the entire show in one go, and hangs for a bit when opening the episode select page. This is one of their bigger shows I think.
It's just so lazy and bad.
When you watch Survivor (yes, the tv show), sometimes a player does a bad play, gets publicly caught, and has to go on a "I'm sorry" tour the next days. Came to mind after reading this tweet. He is not sorry for what he's done. He is sorry for getting caught.
There is no government small enough to for the average ignoramus to "watch" or understand in any meaningful way and our population and indeed people at large are absolutely shockingly stupid and informed about little beyond their hobbies and professions.
Look at for instance medicine. Medicine is vastly too complicated for average folks to "watch" or understand. We don't simplify medicine or appoint more ignorant boobs to decide what drugs are useful in between episodes of survivor we have a professional system which qualifies experts and helps us select individuals who actually know things to produce guidelines, useful decisions, and regulation.
There is no difference between that and civil engineering or astronomy. Government isn't merely another discipline it is the coordination of a multitude of disciplines which the electorate are equally incompetent at.
A government an idiot who can't follow complex plots on TV shows can understand its functionally incapable of delivering a useful product to allow one to run a 23T GDP country of 338M people and its not a useful goal.
I don't buy games from online unless there's no other alternative and I don't care. Usually it's some small, silly game I'm playing with my gf. But for everything _I_ want, it's physical medium, only. If sony or nintendo ever release a console that has no ability to use physical media, I will not purchase it. I say this because I believe nintendo has a version of the switch that has no ability to play physical media. I'm ok with different versions like that, I'm not ok with not being able to purchase a version that uses physical media.
Same with music, I have a huge music collection. A lot of them are pirated, many of them are FLAC rips from physical discs.
The _ONE_ exception I have to this is movies on Amazon. I'm not a huge movie/television guy but I _DO_ consume most of that type of media via Amazon Prime and Netflix. If something goes away I generally don't care, and if I _DO_ care I either already have physical copies or I know I can purchase them. So I will sometimes purchase this type of media on Amazon because I find the convenience acceptable considering the risk. Sometimes I'll repurchase on Amazon for things I physically own just for the convenience of it.
---
But yeah, pirating is going to become rampant again due to the behavior of these companies. I certainly have no qualms about doing it.
Generally speaking, if I want to watch a show and it's been pulled off of netflix or prime for some other service (HBO, CBS, etc) I just pirate it and move on.
I haven't watched past the last season of Survivor that's available on Amazon because I don't care enough to pirate it, but when I do decide I want to watch through the rest of it, that's how I'll consume it.
And fuck'em. You can't even _BUY_ the latest seasons on Amazon (my gf was purchasing them as she watched through them until they stopped offering it at all).
You don't want my money, then you don't want my money.
Thanks, I’ll take your word for it at face value. It’s good to know that. That he’s no representing his actions as philanthropic. My distaste for him is therefore rooted in his content coming through an untraditional vector and my initial experience through my kids thinking he was trying to help people.
I’ve explained things to my kids, they get it now too. And if he’s honest about what he’s trying to do then I thinks it’s mostly okay and I can just recalibrate my thinking, nudge things towards putting his category of content in the same box as something like the Survivor reality TV show, which is mostly fine. MrBeast has simply distributed his content in a different way.
Good thread! part of why I come to HN. One of the few places for public discourse online where there’s opportunity for an actual exchange of ideas and changing opinions. (I mean it’s possible, plenty of people still dug in and are resistant to discussion of something in a way that could change their mind. Which is still even okay, we all have harder held opinions, and because disagreement here is often still productive to read through and rarely descends to toxic levels.)
Today, I am thankful that HN is not a toxic waste dump of flame wars and troll bait and provides an outlet to discuss interesting things with random stranger who are often way smarter than me. Happy Thanksgiving to all of the Americans reading this! As you sit down to meals with family and friends or even if you’re alone, I wish you all well and hope you all have ample things to be thankful for.
For parts of the world that don’t celebrate a thanksgiving of sorts on this day, f&ck you. kidding! I’m thankful for all of you too and wish you well just as much. We’re all entirely too interconnected these days to ignore the fact that what’s good for $X group of people in the world, to the extent that it doesn’t harm others in any significant way, adds an incremental amount to the collective uplift provided by civilization.
From one American to the global HN community, I’m thankful for you all. Except #@dang. Dang is too good. I’m convinced ycombinator either has like a GPT-5 model bot trained to do things here or there’s an army of not-dangs working behind the scenes to keep this community roughly on the rails. ;) Happy Thanksgiving Dang(s)!
Imagine being obsessed with quantum physics fundamental rules, or designing the proper type system for JavaScript, or wanting to bring personal computers to the masses. Would you honestly be also interested in watching House or chatting with other people about the last Survivor TV show? Come on !!!
I remember a specific case of this happening with a popular CBS tv show "The Unit". I thought it was quite good. Apparently a lot of other people did too because it was one of their most popular shows. But it was cancelled after 3 seasons and replaced with another garbage reality tv show like Jersey Shore, the Kardashians or Survivor or something.
The reason was that the Unit filmed in different locations and had lots of explosions and other things that made it expensive to film.
They decided they could replace it with a show one third as popular that had 1/20th the production cost.
From a business perspective, you can charge one third as much for ads and still come out way ahead because reality garbage costs nothing to make.
There are a few seasons of US Big Brother which are genuinely great, intelligent and deep TV. You have to look past the production a bit and get in their heads. At the end of the day, it’s people trapped inside a TV show. It’s a psychological experiment. It’s a real competition for real money involving deception and alliances. Same with Survivor. These shows are often bad but there are some gem seasons out there.
It's hilarious that after a decade of explosion in streaming the corps still can't (don't want to) beat the experience of torrents + mpv.
The latter is particularly interesting since there are no licensing issues. Every professional streaming service should have a better player than mpv. None actually do.
You could say that it's always like that because pirates get their content for free. However, Spotify and others managed just fine with music which used to be even more widely pirated than tv shows and movies.
(Survivor.S41E09.Whos.Who.in.the.Zoo is available on torrents in 1080p.)
> Survivor (a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on)
Music licensing?
If you look at twenty years ago, there's far more content available now, for far less money. Your minimum cable outlay back then would still cover the cost of a couple streaming services.
What there isn't is a good way to get a single subscription to watch anything you want. The cable bundle was close to that for TV content, but very lacking for movies. So if you want to watch a really wide sampling of TV content, it can feel like we're going backward, since there's no more one-stop-shop.
Careful what you wish for? The big desire then was a la carte, and right now you can bounce between streaming services at will, and they're all still far easier to cancel than cable.
Some things have fallen through the cracks, particularly long-running (going back to the pre-streaming era) major-network content like the aforementioned Survivor (a random missing episode seems like a weird problem, would love to know what was going on). And getting US content stuff internationally is often sub-par, although... I don't recall stories of this being easy at all two decades ago.
So consumers are overall definitely winning, but it's not a perfect victory for everyone.
I went to the TV app on my iPhone, searched for Survivor, scrolled to season 41 episode 9, and saw I could watch it for $3, or you can sign up for Paramount+.
I think the complaints here have to do with poor management of channels, not their existence per se. In the discord I have with some friends (~60 members, with about 20 making 90% of posts), a lot of the channels arose because a handful of people with a specific interest were clogging up a general-interest channel with hundreds of posts that were not interesting to most people. If you are not interested in survivor, you try to skim through those hundreds of posts, and you miss the discussion of, say, other tv shows that you are interested in. Now I, who don't care about survivor, can choose to ignore it, or occasionally skim it for jokes, without worrying that I'm missing a topic that I'd be interested in. Certainly we have some channels that are rarely used, and could probably be pruned, but we also don't gratuitously create channels for topics that we don't have a demonstrated need for. Worth noting that we don't police the categorization much, so sometimes topics spill over, and that is fine.
If Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps refused to do post-race interviews, they're still the best in the world at their events, and their feats would still be covered by the media. Caveat: opting out of regulations directly connected to competitors' athletic abilities (i.e. drug testing) is different.
Competitive sports are slightly muddier than individual events, but the principle holds. It's called "sports entertainment" not the other way around because without the top-tier competitive sport aspect, it'd just be Survivor-like entertainment shows.
And the movie star thing is different because they're literally hired for marketing purposes; the whole point of "star power" is that I'll go see any movie Tom Hanks is in.
Separately, I take issue with the notion that just because you're rich, mental health should be a non-issue. That's like saying that since you can easily afford burn victim treatment, you should stop complaining and walk into the burning building.
I thought about this as well but reality TV shows are still enough of a spectacle that it's clear that big money is involved.
Survivor placed the contestants on an island competing in elaborate challenges with camera's everywhere for a million dollar prize.
The Bachelor featured a wealthy suitor/suitress and a dozen attractive people of the opposite sex dressed in ridiculously expensive clothing again with camera's everywhere doing extravagant things.
Anyone can end up on YouTube, only certain people can end up on TV and viewers always have this in the back of their minds.
So this in part comes down to what novelists call a “type of conflict” that Trek makes great use of, but Wars does not. The term is usually “Man vs. Technology conflict” but if I were writing it, I would call it “people versus tools” to clarify that usually fighting off a robot counts as one of the other conflicts. Like if you have to land a plane, that is PvTool conflict.
In Star Wars, this conflict is largely but not entirely absent. In a climactic scene of A New Hope, the rebels get to blow up the Death Star, except—“It didn’t go in. Just impacted on the surface.” Very short bursts in the middle of other conflict. Similarly there is a short moment of Han Solo explaining that he needs to give his computer time to make hyperspace calculations lest they all die—it is another really tiny moment to enhance a larger existing conflict.
Whereas with Trek it is usually more pronounced, “no one has ever done those things with these tools, how do we even begin to do it?” ...
A lot of the rest of the apparent difference comes down to format. The Trek that we remember had to be rushed and crushed. The episodes were short and the TV stations reserved the right to show them out of order, so just like virtually all TV off that time, there was typically a short circular arc by which everyone at the end of the episode must more or less be however they started.
One really interesting thing someone pointed out to me about reality TV was that it was extremely cognitively complex for its time, and indeed this was its selling point. People watched Survivor because something changed as a result of every episode and there was a lot of mental stimulation of the form “ooh I wonder who would be the best strategic target for him to take out?!” . There was a little of this in other places; I like to think about how we used to debate whether a French chef should really challenge Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, or whether he should have the audacity to fight the nearly undefeatable Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba. But even those shows returned mostly to the same place week after week.
I rarely get useful results from Duckduckgo, so !g is my usual first attempt, not a secondary thing after trying DDG's results.
For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder).
I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia.
Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.).
The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context.
DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question.
This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless.
Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.
The real problem here is that consumers don't want culture. The emoji movie made over $200mm at the box office while having a budget one quarter of that. Survivor got so many seasons because it did well with viewers. Studios don't care if they have to put out crap as long as it makes them money.
If Amazon prime becomes a household good, meaning it sees wide adoption by a large viewing segment which doesn't care about seeing high quality content, that puts Amazon in a great position to churn out bad shows with popular appeal.
So you're telling me that the producers of The Emoji Movie and the 20+ seasons of Survivor get culture, and realize that content is about quality?
US movie studios and television production are more costly than they need to be, because they need to pay for the barnacles and rent-seeking cruft that attached themselves to the industry when they were operating for a half century with an oligopoly on distribution.
When challenged by upstarts, they reduced costs by making crap reality shows and squeezing established franchises to death theaters. They are a business, and at this point, they will be squeezed by Amazon & Netflix.
Its like the "Survivor" TV show. Or "The Apprentice" - hey who was the host of that?
Yes, that's pretty much what I meant to say as my comment above. I have not watched TV in a decade, but I hear these calls of TV dying all the time. The thing is, TV is not going to die because it is essentially fulfilling the core needs of human urges (that is, to hear and tell stories). The TV may take another shape and form, as it has in the form of Internet videos and video-watching. Who tells and creates stories (the production houses) is also insignificant.
However, TV has indeed evolved over the years. It has gone from fictional shows like Lost which made space for semi-fictional reality TV shows era (Lost was a precursor to Survivor), to Cinema-like experience of GoT. TV has also seen itself evolve so fast that fictional shows like House of Cards lost itself to the reality on the ground.
These are human evolution in terms of what we're telling ourselves via our stories. It matters less how we're telling stories (Netflix, Internet, CBS...doesn't matter).
IMHO, what hurt western civilization the most is reality shows like Big Brothers,Survivor, Jackass, Celebrity show X or Z. Somehow these shows reward narcissism, individualism, greed, anti-social behavior, sexual, moral harassment and exploitation.
When MTV started to broadcast Jackass I knew a paradigm shift had happened.
People like to blame anything sort of things for our decline, but for me broadcasting that crap and accepting it as moral absolutely shaped the modern west.
Friends was just a funny sitcom that actually talked about friendship which is something positive, no matter how bad it handled that theme.
"people do find it desirable"
Americans are culturally completely blind to narrowcasting, in this case narrowcasted beliefs about lifestyle.
For example, millions of people are rabid extreme fans of the TV show "Survivor". Its economically important. Its culturally and socially relevant (well, to its super fans who insist on seeing life thru a "Survivor" lens). Enormous sums of money change hands over this one TV show, from its production to its marketing to small time betting. Large amounts of social signalling happen about this TV show. There's nothing wrong with this little hobby of theirs, and they should be left alone. And there's a lot of them.
Yet... yet 29 in 30 people won't watch that TV show for free. Regardless of its economic activity or price or value to an extremely small minority of the population, its value to 97% of the population is zero to negative. For 29 out of 30 people doing anything else is preferable to watching that free TV show.
Someone not blind to narrowcasting can hold both interpretations in their head at the same time.
I would theorize the numbers are not all that different with an analogy of urban living. You can slap any price you'd want on a NYC, SF, SV condo or house, and maybe even get it from another urbanite, but for 29 out of 30 people the value of that property would be zero to negative regardless of the price. That's kinda why almost no one lives there now. There's nothing "wrong" with living there although statistically roughly no one wants to.
I think that philosophical outlook mixes well with that 1984 style authoritarian streak that Americans have, "everything that is permissible must be compulsory" Because we're not going to disassemble and resettle the cities Pol Pot style, we must permit them, and if we permit something it must be compulsory for all, therefore all humans must be moved into cities for their own good regardless of their own opinions on the topic and any deviation from the party line that its a universal good with no downsides is double plus badthink not to be tolerated.
There is likely a lot of "crab pot" thinking where people suffering will do anything to stop others from ending their suffering. Every broken into car, every mugging, every raping, every shooting, all are proof we must stick together to keep everyone else in the city or else I'll have to run for it too. How dare he think himself better than us, we better drag him back down into this crab pot of a city.
> if drugs are harmful and addictive, why can't society ban people from selling them, like it does for all sorts of other harmful products?
That begs the question: should society ban the sale of harmful products? I can buy: a sword; a gun; a packet of cigarettes; arsenic; cyanide; Doritos; Dianetics; Season 1 of Survivor and so forth. All of these things may be argued by some to be harmful (and by others not to be).
Why may I not choose to buy cocaine, LSD or marijuana as well?
The real advice, having been thru many non-coastal telecom mergers:
Its just like a merger on that old TV show Survivor, there's 3000 of us, 100 of you, and after "synergy" there's only going to be 3000 positions, so nothing personal but you are all gone.
The first meetings with the new bosses are a job interview, treat it as such.
Highest priority should be a transfer into the buying company. You want to get on to the existing team as the newest hire, not sitting on the team that's being picked bare before downsizing. Existing teams in the big company have political power and thats all that matters.
Start saving every penny, your job is gone but you have warning you'll be looking for work soon. You may have relo expenses, may not find a job immediately, who knows.
Its easier to find work when you're the first rat to desert the sinking ship, not the last. You want to be the first guy to get a new job. Unless you're 64 and planning to retire, ignore a couple thousand bonus if you stick around. Six months of lost income is probably a lot more than $5K if you're the last downsized. Pretend that bonus doesn't exist unless you're planning on retiring or dropping out.
Assume you've lost it all. The job title, the work environment, the benefits, the vacation time, the seniority, the freedom, the technology. If you get to keep any of it after the merger, you'll feel better.
Sometimes the merger is the time to get away with things. Why, I've always been able to work from home. This is my last chance to upgrade the software without 500 pages of paperwork and procedures, hurry up!
Back in the day, people had hobbies. Collecting butterflies, studying physics, cataloging all the fungi on earth etc. Maybe today it would be more like visiting all the places Survivor filmed, or collecting a model of every sword in any Conan movie.
Isn't everything in the media designed to manipulate our emotions? I mean, those commercials to sponsor children in Africa, trying to make you feel guilty, and how for just the price of your morning coffee you can keep Timmy off the streets, and eating well?
You can argue FB relies on user content, but then I can compare that to reality TV shows, and how they'll take real-life footage, and manipulate it to trigger emotions.
For example, American Idol will paint a picture of someone struggling their whole life, and how this is their one opportunity for success after being fired from McDonalds and having their cat pass away. Then just as you're feeling sorry, they light up the stage, and you rejoice. Meanwhile, they forgot to tell you that person had professional training twice a week for the past 10 years, they won two other singing competitions earlier in the year, and live in a beautiful neighborhood, but that doesn't play into the emotions they want you to feel, and that doesn't get you to watch next week.
Or a show like Survivor, and how they'll take footage, and try to fabricate relationships and drama out of thin air. This way you become angry towards one character that'll be in the finale, and are likely to tune in to ensure they don't win.
Why can't Facebook do the same? Why can't they analyze and manipulate user emotions to increase business?
I think she's kinda cute. If I uploaded kittens playing with string people would feel safe admitting they're watching solely because they're cute, but we must pretend that young men watching a cute young woman must solely be watching for her amazing pair of literary values and production quality.
There is an obvious blind spot relating to narrowcasting in both your examples. Both hollywood action sequels and youtube videos have the hidden assumption that they're the dominant form of media, they are our culture, everyone participates, they're what makes us, us. The national pastime, or whatever. Insinuating that they're not would get a extremely harsh reaction from those socialized to respond that they are. Kinda like religion but I'm tryin to keep on topic.
In both examples, 99% of the population won't watch either for free. You can be rejected by 99.75% of the US population yet get a youtube gold plaque for 1 million views. Given those real world facts, its no great surprise that the Venn diagram of a microscopic fraction of the US population who are Jenna fans does not have much coincidental overlap with the small and shrinking fraction of the US population who watch hollywood movies.
If your advertising message is you're the best individual example of the self described dominant form of modern media, admitting the truth that no one in the general population watches, even for free or near free, would really screw up the message.
Its a fun self awareness hack to evaluate someones worldview by asking them what percentage of the US population watches "Survivor" for example. Strongly bimodal, with the wrong answer being "almost everyone because it defines modern pop culture" and the right answer being "almost no one".
Another peculiar observation is I can walk down the street and notice that plenty of young men admire the young ladies with no hollywood production values at all
The tool analogy breaks down in that most people don't can't won't own or use tools, and the popularity curve shows that although people with a basement full do exist, they're kind of rare and most people only use a couple.
A better analogy for social networking is watching a drama TV show. I don't at all, which is supposedly really weird. But of those who do, they follow a bell curve where most people only follow a couple TV shows. So they've gotta periodically swear one off cold turkey. Like these posts you claim to dislike.
Its much more like swearing off watching Survivor, than like giving up on the hammer.
> You just presented your product for 15 minutes on a nationally broadcasted TV show that will be re-aired at least two or three times and sell a ton of shows on itunes. That sort of advertising would cost about a million dollars or more.
Reality shows are about losing; game shows are about winning. But some people go into these shows with a completely different mindset: this is an interview and demo for the world, not for the on-show judges.
Top Chef players demonstrate how well they can run kitchens and work with people they didn't ask to hire and don't actually like.
Amazing Race players are usually demonstrating how well they can communicate and work effectively under severe stress in foreign countries. (If you're looking for a new overseas salesperson, look through a season of Amazing Race. You'll see what it takes to make them crack.)
Survivor players are either demonstrating team-leadership or diplomacy (defined as saying "nice doggy!" while picking up a rock). Choose carefully, there...
Reality TV is actually a dream business product for entertainment networks. This works on two levels - people are far more inclined to follow stories if they believe the characters are real. Great authors and storytellers have the skill to create 'real' sounding characters. Reality TV works on the assumption that the characters are real - skipping over the part where the writers have to skilfully create the characters. Thus you don't need many writers to come up with reality TV, just general plot points.
The second part is that the actors generally work for free, or close to free. This gets around pesky actors problems, such as unions, conditions and all the other things.
So you have people with a lower internal bar to 'believing' the stories and getting involved, and a cast that generally is working for free under conditions that would get regular actors up in arms.
The result is big profits for a successful reality TV show. The problem is that reality is rarely interesting outside a game show or contrived setup (ie survivor, biggest loser). So you get quasi-reality shows like Operation Repo which is completely acted following scripts but posing as reality, through the 'reality like' shows where real events are distorted to highlight the differences, right down to proper documentaries which try and follow the facts as blandly as possible. And the ratings will, other things being equal, be inversely proportionate to the amount of 'reality' in the show.
Bottom line : people who are to go on reality TV shows would do well to avail themselves of the facts before going in. Whether this means getting an agent or something like that, I don't know. But wishing and hoping for fair treatment is an unwise strategy. (note: I'm addressing reality shows in general, not this specific example).
like a bad episode of Survivor
I am currently paying for Hulu Plus and can't figure out whether it's worth it or not. Things that bother me are (1) commercials despite me paying, (2) the fact that I can't reliably play the videos on my Ubuntu boxes since they use Flash, (3) lack of content from certain networks (e.g.: Survivor is only available on cbs.com, not on Hulu which makes it kind of useless to try to build a media center PC around Hulu), (4) all the silly clips of shows they have: I am trying to watch full episodes and think that clips are for YouTube, and finally (5) the fact that since I started paying they pulled a bunch of content (e.g.: first season of Glee, first season of Modern Family, etc.) despite the premise that you pay for that content being available.
On one hand I'm still actively using their service. On the other, I am trying to figure out the most effective way to tell them that I am not satisfied with it. Canceling will lose them $120/year which is measly. Anybody got any ideas of how to make an impact on what they do?
Alternatively, does anyone know of (legal) alternatives to Hulu? I have no problem with paying for a good service, just can't find someone to give my money to.
Shirky wrote, "Expensive bits of video made in complex ways now compete [emphasis mine] with cheap bits made in simple ways. 'Charlie Bit My Finger' was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera." That's akin to writing in the early 2000s that since movie and TV products like "Blair Witch," "Survivor," and other reality TV programs became so popular, it meant that the public was losing its appetite for video of high production values, and that this was likely to become a permanent trend.
The talk in Edinburgh last year mentioned at the top of Shirky's piece was to UK TV executives. Here's a Reuter's headline about it: "TV executives meet in Edinburgh as ad drought continues." Here's a bit of an article from the Guardian published 2 days ago:
"Analysts double the forecast for television market in 2010
A report says that bullish spending by advertisers has led to the revised predictions for 2010
Bullish spending from TV advertisers has led analysts to more than double the forecast for year-on-year growth in the UK market, with ITV set for a boost of up to 30% in the second quarter."
I saw it on NBC. The attitude of the anchor was "Oh, you are on camera 24/7 -- that's crazy -- and people are actually watching it -- you go to the bathroom, shower on camera -- that's crazy."
And the always cheap "You're probably getting more dates now..." and at the end, "Keep your shirt on, buddy" (in a mocking way).
It was pretty silly. I thought Justin could've answered a little better -- he should have compared Justin.tv to the reality TV shows. When Survivor (the 1st big reality TV show) came out, it was crazy popular and of course the pundits were like, "Its all a fad...", blah, blah, blah. But of course, they were all wrong.
Like that, Justin should have marketed Justin.tv as the next generation in Reality TV, which couldn't happen on TV because of technology constraints -- it could only happen on the Net. And compare himself to the creator of Survivor, to give the public an image of the pioneer that he is and what he could accomplish....
just my (cents 2)