In the early days of Survivor, the show would get 40 million viewers every week. It was a breakout star in the world of television and prime water cooler material every week. It got coverage in all of the tabloid magazines, radio shows across the country would talk about the episodes and the players became mini celebrities. When you see players who go on now wanting to use it as a launching pad to become famous, remember that it actually happened back in the days of Borneo and Australia.

Because there was no formula for how to play Survivor the original cast of Borneo had to go onto the island without a blueprint. Having no idea how the show would be received once it aired, every player had to decide how to go about play the game they thought would best work for them. I mean that in the sense of advancing within the rounds of Survivor itself but also in terms of how to come out looking good. If you go back and look at Borneo through the lens of someone who has watched 34 seasons of Survivor, not much of it makes sense.

Including that time they had a Blair Witch themed challenge

Most striking in that first season is the uneasiness most players felt in creating alliances. The Pagongs were essentially outright opposed to it, feeling that it was unfair to vote as a group instead of just voting out the players who were least deserving (which is a whole other story, is it not unfair to unilaterally decide that someone doesn’t deserve to be there?). What isn’t outright said on the show but would be understood from anyone who watched it live is that the players are reluctant to create alliances because of how it would be perceived. Because the microscope on these players was so large, they didn’t want to do something that might be seen as sneaky or slimy to reach that million dollar prize.

Since part of the Tagis decided to form an alliance, helmed by Richard Hatch, they became the poster children for the “bad guys” of Borneo. That hatred of the alliance reached a peak at the merge when Gretchen Cordy, the leader of the Pagongs, was blindsided for being too much of a threat to win the game. That is of course the impossible to repeat 4–1–1–1–1–1–1 vote. That was the point to which the general audience completely flipped on the Tagis if they had not already sided with the Pagongs. Since this was everybody’s first time watching Survivor, there was no precedent to how moral the show should be and Richard and his motley crew was making sure to establish that morals shouldn’t come into play at all.

Feeling like there could be some backlash over an alliance, some players sought to find different ways around deciding how to vote. The most obvious example of that is Sean Kenniff’s “Alphabet” strategy in which he would vote for the person whose name was earliest in the alphabet. What Sean realized was that all of the Pagong tribe members had names that came before the Tagis in the alphabet and that ensured that he would be pseudo voting with the alliance that he denied existed on camera but had to know in his mind was running the game.

After Borneo, the cast of Survivor: Australia had kind of an idea what to expect from the audience depending on the type of game they would play. They had all seen Richard and Kelly Wigglesworth march their way to the end while being wildly disliked by the general public and wanted to avoid a similar fate at all costs. Having that kind of context certainly helps explain why Colby Donaldson opted to take Tina Wesson to the end with him instead of taking the easy win by eliminating her and going with Keith Famie.

Once again, someone who would watch that season now would not understand. Colby may have been playing to win but he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his image to do so. Taking out Tina at the end when they had bonded throughout the season and worked together on essentially every vote would have made him look like a villain. Colby did not want to be the next Richard Hatch and the only to avoid that was by taking a chance that he might lose to Tina. Knowing full well that could be a possibility, he still took his chances and was able to live with himself.

In Australia, we also saw the birth of the most infamous reality television villain we will ever see: Jerri Manthey. Her case is truly one you needed to have experienced to understand. In comparison to some of the things people do on television today, Jerri was tame but she was a trail blazer. She was antagonistic to Keith over his cooking methods, she started unproven claims that Kel had smuggled and eaten beef jerky on the island to convince her tribe to vote him off. In confessionals she was bitchy and snarky and to her tribe mates she was rude and hard to live with. Jerri became so annoying to deal with that Colby and Tina opted to stop a Pagong-ing of the Kucha tribe simply to not have to live with her anymore.

Once Jerri hit the airwaves, there was a huge backlash against her. She could not go anywhere without being recognized and insulted. She was booed at almost any public appearance she made. She was legitimately disliked by millions and millions of people for a game she had played on television. By the time she finished her second stint in All-Stars, she was booed off the stage at Madison Square Garden like she was Eddy Curry trying to run up and down the court. Jerri Manthey was vehemently disliked.

For the players who were beloved, it was much of the same. Rupert Boneham mania reached a fever pitch around the time of Pearl Islands and All-Stars. To illustrate how much of a cultural icon the game was at the time and how huge Rupert was as a fan favorite, the show awarded him 1 million dollars simply for being well-liked. At no point would we ever see Survivor give someone a million simply for appearing on the show nowadays.

During this time period, Survivor players would come under heavy fire in the media when they did something deemed bad in the eyes of the public. Players like Sue Hawk, Jerri and Clay Jordan (or much of the cast of Thailand) were outright detested by the audience and were made aware of their standing whenever they were making appearances. The thing about this era is that while those players may have known they were disliked, it was rare that any fan might have the chance to directly interact with the players.

Over time, the Survivor craze died and players were allowed to go out and exist as themselves without being too bothered. Nobody was talking about Shane Powers being a legitimate lunatic out on Panama or the entirety of the Raro tribe destroying Penner’s character in Cook Islands. It became a lot safer to go out and play Survivor without experiencing huge amounts of backlash unless you did something really noteworthy like say… accepted a deal for a car in exchange for giving away immunity and later reneged on the deal. Other than Dreamz, Survivors were mostly left to their own devices during what is essentially known as the middle era of Survivor.

Around 2011, a website called Twitter started to really boom in popularity. The social media website allowed people to talk about various things and hashtags made it easy to group said things together. There had always been an online Survivor presence, most notably on the Survivor Sucks message board, but Twitter became a whole different beast. With Sucks, unless a Survivor player was choosing to be a part of the community, they would never see what was said about them. On Twitter, nearly every new-age player that would be cast on the show had a handle that was very public. For the first time ever, fans could now communicate directly with the players without any constraints.

The Twitter boom helped usher in the current era of Survivor where the narrative has been “big moves” and flashy gameplay. Part of that is Jeff Probst pushing for things they can show on camera but in the background, the knowledge that the players’ every moves will be heavily analyzed online plays a part too. Nobody back in the days of Borneo was able to find Sean Keniff and tell him he was being an idiot for using his “Alphabet” strategy but it was very easy to find Brad Culpepper and tell him that he was a dick during Blood vs Water.

…and some people had no trouble telling Brad that to his face

While Survivor never reached the apex that it did in 2000–01, I would argue that it is currently a more difficult game to manage now than it ever has been before. The rise of social media has also brought along a scourge of websites, much like this one, and podcasts that analyze every single second of footage aired within a given week. Monday Morning Quarterbacks now exist for the game of Survivor and they are here to tell the players every little thing they did wrong after every episode.

Not only are players now over-analyzed, if they misspeak or say something in the heat of the moment, they can now expect to have to defend their every word on social media. Twitter and Facebook has a certain reputation for being chaotic and once its majority decides they do not like a certain player, good luck dealing with the wave of criticism heading that person’s way. If you need to see for yourself there’s an easy way. After any episode has aired, go and check out what people are saying on Survivor’s official Facebook page. During Game Changers, Sandra Diaz-Twine took much of the brunt of the criticism. Not even because she was doing anything devious but because she was moving in instead of Facebook favourites like Caleb Reynolds and Malcolm Freberg.

If that doesn’t convince you, here are just a few tweets I was able to find over five minutes about random Game Changers moments and players by some Twitter Survivor fans:

…and you can trust me when I say none of those tweets are close to some of the worst things that get said on that website. Especially when considering those that are directed directly at a player’s Twitter handle.

The fear of negative feedback has in my opinion also diluted characters to a certain extent. No one wants to deal with the harsh backlash of a #exposedparty on Twitter and that makes some people hold back. Even if players are willing to unload to their heart’s content, producers are also hyper aware of what is being said and control the content they want to put out in the universe. Could Jonny Fairplay really have existed in the post-Twitter universe? Maybe a watered down version but there is no way some of the stuff he pulled during Pearl Islands gets shown to today’s Twitter averse fan community.

To play back in the day was to expose yourself to a huge audience that might talk about your misdeeds to the friends at work. To play in the current climate is to expose yourself to a smaller audience that now has the capability of talking about how terrible you are directly to you. I don’t know about you but I would prefer letting people talk about the stuff they hate about me to someone else instead of to my face.

So just because 40 million people aren’t tuning in to watch the show anymore, it doesn’t mean that the players do not get feedback from their performances. To a certain point, it’s great that audience is willing to engage with the players and ask questions. It helps keep the excitement going from week to week and most contestants are willing to mix it up with fans. That said, consider your words the next time you want to tweet some expletives at someone you saw on TV because behind that manufactured image from CBS is an actual person with feelings.