Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: August 23, 2000

PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Survivor, “The Final Four” (Season 1, Episode 13) [Watch on Amazon Prime]

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: By the time it had reached its season finale, Survivor was already well cemented as a national phenomenon. Wall-to-wall coverage. Tenth-place finishers becoming household names. Watercoolers crowded with slacking employees wondering if Kelly could possibly make it to the end now that her alliance had turned their backs on her. I watched the Survivor finale live at home with my family. When was the last time you watched something live on TV with your family that wasn’t sports?

And yet it could not have been easy to put this finale together. Richard Hatch’s dastardly Tagi alliance had dispatched the last of their opponents the previous week, and while the process of building up begrudging respect towards Richard had begun, he was not close to being a winner the fans were eager to cheer for. No, the audience was in love with Rudy, crumudgeonly old grump and adorable homophobe. Looking back, it’s hilarious to think any of us expected that Rudy could actually win, since there was no way in hell anyone else on that island would have chosen him to sit next to them in front of a jury. Most of the intrigue was on rafting instructor Kelly Wigglesworth, who had been the first of the alliance members to waffle and to flirt with switching sides to the younger, cooler, less strategically inclined players. Kelly ultimately never pulled the trigger on a flip, and it was her former best bud Sue Hawk who had Kelly’s number, correctly intuiting that Kelly was trying to work her potential jurors and throw the rest of the alliance under the bus. No more ruthless or cutthroat than any of the alliance’s other tactics, but Sue had inadvertently violated one of the cardinal rules of reality television: she’d come there and made friends. She didn’t mean to, and she may well have told you that she hadn’t, but watching Sue’s wounded reaction to being betrayed by Kelly during the final 4 vote, it was easy to see: she thought she and Kelly were friends, and Kelly sent her packing.

(Which, sidebar: Kelly Wigglesworth will be back on Survivor this fall for their “second chances” all-star season, and it will be fascinating to see if she plays a similarly cutthroat game now that everybody else plays the same way.)

Back to season one, though: there was definitely a lesser-of-two-evils quality to the final two pairing of Richard and Kelly. He the master manipulator and strategist; she the lone wolf who won a string of desperately-need immunity challenges to make it to the end. Rich was the capital-V “Villain” all season, but did anybody truly want to reward the girl who feigned a willingness to switch alliances only to decline to do so?

Much of the jury was ambivalent, but one was not, and it’s Sue Hawk’s metaphor-riddled, idiom-mangling, talk-to-the-calloused-hand speech directed at Kelly (“the rat”) in support of Rich (“the snake”) that still stands as the most memorable moment in the history of this now 15-year-old institution.

Everybody remembers the snakes and the rats of this speech. What get to me watching it now are the smaller moments. Like Sue’s willingness to step outside the game to land a blow (calling Richard a “loser in life”; tossing off that line about why Kelly has failed at everything in her life) or her moments of unexpected self-awareness (“I’m not a very openly nice person”). And yet even still, it’s impossible not to walk away shaking your head at that snake-and-rat metaphor (not to mention the vultures who were meant to take ya and do whatever they want with ya). It was ruthless, it was persuasive, it was juuuuuust shy of poetic, and it perfectly summed up the appeal of Survivor.

Happy anniversary, Sue Hawk’s jury speech. Here’s hoping you still have no ill regrets.

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