Survivor S01E16

I'm not really sure what I did to be so lucky as to get my hands on an advance copy of Survivor: The Ultimate Game, by Mark Burnett with Martin Dugard (New York: TV Books, 2000), so I'll just ascribe it to clean living. The less said about the exact circumstances of my acquiring it -- on September 8, fully four days before its official release date -- the better, I think. Plus, you don't care how I got it: What you want to know is what's in it. To lend veracity to my claim that I really did get the book, really did read it, and really am reviewing it, I will provide page number citations in parentheses.

The reader's best clue as to the tone and content of the book actually comes at the end, in Mark Burnett's brief biography: "He has given motivational, leadership, and team-building speeches for such clients as IBM, Citibank, Sony, USA Networks, Discovery Channel, and AdWeek Asia" (237). This line on Burnett's résumé hasn't been hyped quite as much as his more adventuresome involvement producing the Eco-Challenge for the Discovery Channel; in an odd way -- as much as I loved and was completely seduced by Survivor -- it disappointed me to learn that fact about Burnett, since it lent the whole show the air of a particularly intricate corporate retreat. Did the corporate lecturer in Burnett somehow craft the show in such a way as to favour Richard the Corporate Trainer?

The book suggests that the project's team-building elements were, predictably enough, concentrated around the time when there were still two teams -- and Burnett's management-speak occasionally creeps into the pre-Rattana chapters (or "Evolution"s, as they're mysteriously titled). "'Survivor' is about how you can manipulate complicated team dynamics under pressure," he writes (12). Burnett repeatedly gives Gretchen props for her management skills, quite apart from her traditional survival skills, noting that her work with children, as a pre-school teacher, provided her with "the greatest learning ground anywhere" (27), and crediting her with calming a weary B.B. when he'd apparently decided to throw the bug-eating challenge: "She wouldn't let him give into his weakness. Instead, she encouraged him with eye-contact and spoken communication to perform to the best of his ability" (48). Good call not trying to convince him using semaphore, girlfriend. In the midst of apparently neutral descriptions of vulnerable players Stacey and Dirk, Burnett slips into pat explanations for their problems; he implies that Stacey found firmer footing when "[s]he smiled more" (46), and suggests that the mere fact of Dirk's religious faith, regardless of the particular way Dirk may have chosen to express it (which, if you'll recall, was not shown much in the episodes as they were edited), alienated his tribemates: "There seems to be something threatening about a devout person of faith to non-believers....[T]hat person is quietly scorned as a reminder of imperfection" (59).

As the narrative continues -- each chapter is equivalent with the length of time encompassed in each episode -- and the group dynamics evolve in ways that no one could have possibly predicted, Burnett abandons the pop psychology; fortunately, the occasional titillating glimpse of actual psychology sneaks in. Each candidate participated in a session with psychologist Dr. Gene Ondrusek before being cast on the show, and met with him again on the island immediately upon being voted off. From these interviews, Burnett gleans some insights that, when dropped into the book without much (or any) context, come across as catty. And I love it! Jenna "was deeply insecure and had deep feelings of anger towards men" (104). Dirk was "a complex personality -- someone who adopts an outside structure system to bind up negative impulses. Rather than incorporate negative impulses into [his life, he] shun[ned] them out of great fear" (96-7). "Even in his sixties, B.B. was still proving his manhood to a father for whom even the best wasn't good enough" (38).

Burnett saves some of his most trenchant observations to round out the reader/viewer's image of Greg. "He had no interest in allowing Chief Jeff or television to be the arbiter of reality" (53). "Greg...was beginning to display signs of disturbing behavior. He had taken to walking the beaches speaking into an empty coconut shell. The coconut was his 'nature phone,' he said. A voice in the phone spoke to him. Greg was hard at work on a satellite dish to increase reception" (103). Considering that on the show, this affectation was portrayed as whimsical and cute, it's quite a revelation that the show's executive producer actually regarded this as "disturbing." Then there's the time a pair of Green Berets arrived on the island to assist in mounting a challenge (the last before Joel got the boot): "Greg...immediately changed from his bathing suit into a pair of shorts that were torn and exposed his genitals. [Hi, I would have liked to see that on TV. Or live, in my office. I'm not made of wood, people.] He got out his nature phone [and] began moaning that 'Survivor' was becoming paramilitary....[H]is barely suppressed rage was becoming an issue....He recited rambling monologues into the camera, talking of the inner voices that guided him, and alluding to his genius compared to that of his tribe members and the production crew" (108-9). "The happy otter look he feigned to disarm the world was being replaced by a hard stare. As his impotence grew, he began to allude to performing an act of violence against the island before he left" (110). Why didn't we see that on CBS? Just because the Tiffany network wouldn't want to be implicated if Greg started a forest fire using matches he won in some twee Reward Challenge, maybe?

By the time the tribes merged, Greg's reputation as a crackpot had reached what remained of Tagi. At the Tribal Summit on the Sand Spit, Sean told Jenna, "I watched him blow up at a camera man one time" (122). However, Greg was never so far gone as not to realize that his longevity on the island depended on his infiltrating the Tagi Alliance (123). What was only suggested on the show is explicitly confirmed in the book; Greg's persistent playing up to Richard is called "Greg's chickenhawk act" (138), and, in case that isn't clear enough, Burnett spells it out: "Greg was wooing Richard and the Alliance in the most obvious and unlikely way possible: Homosexuality" (127). By this point in the book we've already learned about the sexy dream Richard had about Sean (105), which, one assumes, may have had more than a little to do with the fact that Sean made it to the final five and, had Kelly not won so many challenges in a row, would have even made it to the final four. But I digress: My point is that Richard doesn't like blonds. Burnett even gets in a burn on Greg's sister Julie: "His five minutes of family video were either funny or deeply disturbing, depending on whether an individual understood the Buis family humour" (143). Upon his ouster at Tribal Council, when Greg made a show of crying for the cameras, Burnett claims, "No one could tell if it was real or he was just playing make-believe" (150); in fact, I think it was pretty clear Greg was faking it. Grudgingly, Burnett allows, "Compared with Sean's passive disregard for the game, Greg's action's [sic] were genius" (151), but that's faint praise considering Burnett's apparent contempt for Sean: "[I]f the Dark Side of the Force was to be stopped, a Rebel Alliance was imperative. Sean pretending otherwise meant he was either incredibly naïve or incredibly selfish" (146). Not both?

Greg sparked Burnett's suspicion as early as Pagong's first Tribal Council. As Jeff (or "Chief Jeff," as Burnett annoyingly persists in calling him) made with the ponderous solemnity in the middle of the faux-Mayan ruins and chest full of fake millions on the Tribal Council set, "Greg refused to play by either tribe's or television's rules, never giving a straight answer and always finding a unique way to tweak island life" (50). Despite Jeff's valiant attempts at earnestness, Greg was having none of it, and "said so while sitting around the fire pit as the voting was taking place" (51). As B.B. got his wish and started to make his way back to Kansas, Greg "called out a good-bye to B.B. in a loud pirate voice. 'Arrr...and a good captain you were," thus pissing on "the fourth wall -- that unseen barrier between television crew and castaways" (51).

While Greg's culture jamming is funny to...well, me, and probably to a considerable potential audience at home, Jeff "Anal" Probst had a different view: "Greg's clever manipulation had gotten under Jeff's skin. 'I don't ever -- EVER -- want that to happen again,' he said....Greg, in other words, was winning" (51). And Burnett simply couldn't have that; Jeff, the golden boy, was not to be upstaged. In fact, so much of the book is devoted to Burnett's slavish praise of Jeff Probst -- a man who, it is now generally agreed, stank up every minute of his Pulau Tiga screen time -- that I can't help wondering whether Jeff went...uh...the extra mile to land this sweet gig, if you know what I'm saying, and I think you do. Burnett respectfully touches on Jeff's extensive experience as "an on-air personality" (as if that were a real job requiring real skills other than the ability to move and speak) while also acknowledging his comparative obscurity: "A known persona brought baggage in the shape of public expectations. Whoever hosted 'Survivor' would need to spring fully-formed into the public consciousness" (56). In other words, he or she had to be a nobody, and Jeff fit the bill. When Access Hollywood, by which Jeff used to be employed, comes to do a report on the show, Burnett devotes several pages to Jeff's feelings on the visit, as if anyone cares (155-7). An anecdote about Jeff's taunting the castaways by telling them about sitting in his camp eating M&Ms, drinking a Diet Coke, and talking to a friend on the telephone is annotated in the margin of my book with "Jeff SUCKS" (73). Jeff does suck, and yet whenever Burnett mentions him, he can't resist praising Jeff's flexibility, professionalism, good looks, "likeability," and so on. Does Burnett owe Jeff money? Are they frat brothers? What, WHAT does Burnett see in Jeff that the rest of the world doesn't?

While Burnett is under no obligation to mute his obvious affection for Jeff, he does take pains to insist, "At no time did the production treat one castaway differently than any other" (158). That may have been so on the set, but it definitely is not in the book, and in fact, I can give you a quick rundown of Burnett's opinions of each castaway. He likes Sonja, but who didn't? There was barely time to form a poor opinion of her. He likes B.B. too, and seems to feel sorry to have put him among the "MTV Beach House" (passim) that was Pagong, who, save Gretchen, were too whiny to appreciate him: "Instead of empowering themselves by working harder, like Tagi, the Pagongs victimized themselves....Their beach, for lack of a better word, was a slum" (89). He seems to like Stacey, on the whole, and to agree with her post-show claims that she didn't get a chance to show her tribemates her best side, but he also demonstrates her inability to ingratiate herself in a group and pegs that as her downfall. He likes Ramona, but again, she's like Sonja; what did she ever do but vomit? Burnett is quite cruel in his description of Dirk: "He had a coating on his face resembling a beard. His face was sharp from hunger, accentuating his receding hairline" (97). Now, Dirk is fugly -- no one denies that -- but geez, Burnett, you cast him! Cut a brother some slack! Burnett doesn't like Joel, and devotes long passages to describing his struggles to be the "alpha male" of Pagong, in defiance of Gretchen.