Help! My Survivors Have Unionized!

Spoilers follow for seasons 1 and 46 of Survivor

Please forgive me for being a quarter century late to this cultural moment, but I just finished watching the first season of Survivor.

My cohost and coworker Jesse had me over to watch the premiere of the latest season earlier this year, and I was extremely game to check it out. The show is kind of a beautiful mess; only someone dumb like me would jump in at this point, so there is no effort to explain anything that is happening. People are searching for hidden treasure in the jungle, and regularly squandering the immunity it apparently grants. One contestant is challenged to put 20 previous seasons in order, which is a very funny thing to ask someone who is starving in tropical heat to do. There’s something called a Shot in the Dark. Who knows!

But watching the alliances form and break, as people maneuver themselves and each other toward a spot on the dwindling cast, is very compelling. Reality TV is basically putting bugs in a jar and making them fight, but when the bugs show up and they understand the assignment and they are putting on their bug-fighting smile while they get ready to enter glorious combat, you can’t help but be charmed.

Because I am a cord-cutting millennial, I’m not used to waiting a week between episodes, so I decided to check out the very first season, which aired in 2000 (I was 13 when it came out), and see how the very latest season compares to the very earliest. I was very aware of Survivor when it hit the airwaves; there was no way not to be. But all I had ever osmosed from the talk about it was that people were voted off the island, one by one, and that there was a guy who insisted on being naked a lot that everyone was mad at.

It’s amazing how much of the DNA of the modern show survives intact: a much-younger Jeff Probst lays out the rules every episode for people tuning in for the first time, explaining that tribes participate in challenges for food and “immunity”, and every three days the non-immune tribe votes one of their members off. Eventually the tribes merge, different individuals gain immunity during votes, and once there are only two contestants left, a “jury” of the hungry ghosts of recently kicked-off contestants returns to judge a winner by whatever metrics they wish. The winner gets a million dollars (and a brand-new Pontiac Aztek!).

But the feel of the show is very different. The first season is figuring out what it is as it’s being made, starting as sort of a mashup of The Real World and a survival documentary and a gameshow. People are primarily focused on, well, surviving, setting up camp and finding food and assigning responsibilities, and the camera follows them as they navigate the unique situation they find themselves in. No one is thinking about the “game” aspect yet. Resentments begin to form immediately. In one tribe a “corporate trainer” interrupts people diligently working to say that they need to come up with a better system. I immediately dislike this person and hope that they are eaten by a Gila Monster.

But here’s where it gets interesting for me: Richard, the corporate trainer who seems at first blush to be attempting to be a middle manager to this group of castaways, immediately pivots to spear-fishing (!!!) instead to provide tangible benefit to the group, and quickly susses out tribemates who would be good candidates for an alliance. He appears to be the only one on the show who has grasped that voting is the core game mechanic that determines if you stay in the game, and that a single group voting en bloc has tremendous sway over a larger group that is made up of individual agents. This is basic game theory (Russell Crowe’s A Beautiful Mind wouldn’t come out until 2001 so no one knew about game theory yet) and it immediately catalyzes a chain reaction that ignites the entire season.

One by one, this alliance picks off their tribemates, and when the two tribes merge, members of the former opposing tribe are carefully pruned, starting with those holding a leadership role. It’s like something out of a CIA playbook. The opposing tribe is whittled down to nothing, causing increased consternation and despondency among contestants who feel like they are being subjected to the cruel whims of a tyrant. Two of them wear protest t-shirts to a vote, complaining that they are clearly next on the chopping block. But they don’t do anything about it!! At a point where the remaining contestants have the numbers to pick off an alliance member, probably Rich himself (it turns out he’s also the naked guy!), they never consider an opposing alliance and turn on themselves. One guy decided he was going to vote each member alphabetically to be fair. The producers do their best to add uncertainty and tension, with episode titles like “Crack in the Alliance” and “Death of an Alliance”, but the plan goes off without a hitch. The final four contestants, who face off in the season finale, are four that entered into their terrible pact in the early days of island living. I assumed Rich would eventually lose out to Kelly (I remembered someone named Kelly winning some reality TV thing but I was probably thinking of Kelly Clarkson) in the final round but he ended up winning a narrow gender-line vote to take it all.

I was enraptured by this proceeding, and was rooting for exactly the outcome that unfolded. And I think the reason why is that it is such a great illustration of the power of collective action. Maybe I’m reading into it too much, but in the last days of the Clinton administration, when union membership was approaching an all-time low and economics was taught as a series of independent agents creating market consensus from the pursuit of their own best interests, it was so refreshing to see even a slightly organized group presence cut through that vibes-based miasma like tissue paper. People were voting based on who they were friends with, or who they perceived were useful to the group, and were gobsmacked that there was a semi-unknown faction voting instead based on who would be useful to eliminate to advance the interests of that faction. “I didn’t come here to make friends” has become a reality TV cliche, and it may have been uttered for the first time in this very season, but it’s true! If you want to win the game you have to make the best possible actions according to its rules! It’s like getting mad that someone captured your bishop.

Reality TV is real to extremely variable degrees, and part of the magic of that moment is that it was unexpected and probably never happened again. Surely the cast of the second season saw forming voting groups as a winning strategy, and the game was never the same again. In the latest season, it’s a part of the fabric of the game, with factions and alliances rising and falling as the season proceeds, and most of the action is on the human dynamics at play, rather than the survival aspect. Curiously, it seems there’s a popular perception that backstabbing your allies at a crucial point is good to have on your resume at the final jury, so there’s a lot of “blindsides” of people who considered themselves safe, and it keeps things interesting. But it makes it all the more impressive that the original alliance managed, with some hiccups, to drive the entire action of the show until it had eliminated all outside threats.

At a time when union power is finding its feet again against corporate interests with unlimited resources, and students are undergoing incredible systemic violence to make their cause impossible to ignore, it feels of a moment to see some game show contestants realize that they collectively possessed a resource of incredible power, that not even the producers appear to have considered, and band together to wield it to victory. If they can do it, so can we.

Solidarity forever!