Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

The importance of socially unaware players on Survivor

Watching this week’s Survivor: David vs Goliath episode, I was reminded of this fact: generally speaking, a strong sense of self-awareness and level-headedness on a reality television program is a bad thing. Not for the person playing the actual game but for the people watching them on TV. Natalie Cole and her recent and so far, disastrous stint on Survivor is yet another example of why.

Think about the people we generally label as “boring” players. By and large, what they most share is the ability to properly assess their situation with regards to how others see them. They don’t say outrageous things because they realize their ultimate goal: winning Survivor. If you want a much more specific example, compare Survivor: Panama’s Casaya and LaMina tribes. Which tribe did we focus most of the camera time on? The lunatics.

Personally, some of my favorite Survivor moments are when players lacking self-awareness become pivotal players on their season. Twice, Coach has managed to do this and halfway through Tocantins, he started really realizing his power in the absurdity.

If we’re talking about players who lack self-awareness, nobody tops Coach, especially in Survivor: Tocantins before he had a chance to see how the audience at large reacted to him. To think that relatively speaking, Coach is one of the more successful Survivor players in the show’s history is both hilarious and tough to believe. People can feel one way or another about him, but watching Coach play Survivor, it’s impossible to say you don’t at least get a visceral reaction from his behaviour.

Compare Coach to Survivor: Cook Island’s Becky Lee. Which of the two would I say is the better player? To me, it isn’t even remotely close. Becky would outperform Coach as a competitor in any random season of Survivor almost 100% of the time. But tell me how you felt watching Becky play the game? Did she ever elicit any sort emotion out of you? Probably not. She’s a very intelligent, level-headed woman who was there to try and win a lot of money.

It’s one of the most interesting dualities of Survivor. It exists both as a game that people play for a lot of money and a product packaged for a major television network who expects to see some fireworks. When it comes to casting each season, production needs to walk that tightrope in balancing both ends to deliver an adequate product.

It can be hard to predict how things might play out on the actual island. I’m sure that going into Survivor: Gabon, production expected that Kenny, Marcus and Charlie might feature prominently as the more strategy focused players to even out some of the stronger personalities that made up the rest of the cast. Instead, Marcus and Charlie found themselves out very early into jury and Kenny went down his own interesting storyline. What we got instead was a season where the mental asylum was being run by the patients.

That can also swing the other way around. You would figure that production did not anticipate that practically the entirety of the Survivor: Cook Islands pre-mergers would collectively exhibit less personality than a Jeff Probst cardboard cut-out. It didn’t matter if they were self-aware or not because either way, they were boring and that placed a lot of stress on production to create compelling storylines as they went out one after the other.

In both situations, production is left with somewhat of a problem. They can’t outright ignore the strategic elements of the game and focus solely on the insanity happening at camp. A story of how the season played out must have some sort of narrative flowing through the season. When players are voting each other out without rhyme or reason, that becomes an incredibly difficult thing to do.

On the flip side, not having enough eccentric personalities to spread the wealth across multiple people will hurt a season too. It forces production to keep going back to the same well for confessionals and strategic footage. This is a major reason, as far as I’m concerned, that Cook Islands, a season with an overall forgettable cast, produced Ozzy, Parvati, Penner, and Candice, all of whom played a minimum of three times.

Still, going back to Becky, not once did she ever stray from her game plan to try to also entertain the audience… nor should she be expected to. Being a fun character is purely optional. That is why I always feel special adoration for players who can do both extremes simultaneously.

It may have taken him three times to get it right, but Tyson is a perfect example of this. Each time he went out to play Survivor, Tyson was there to win. He always found himself in strong alliances and was always actively participating in the game. At the same time, Tyson made sure to also provide comic relief and funny confessionals for the audience watching at home. While trying to win the game, Tyson was also very conscious of the fact that production had a product to deliver.

I think that a player like Tyson, who went home early-ish in his first season, does well to go out of his way to help production. There isn’t too much difference between Tyson and Brendan Synott on Survivor: Tocantins but Tyson giving as many soundbites as possible and being a chaotic presence certainly gives production incentive to have him return over a much mellower Brendan.

It’s the same kind of thing happening between Tony Vlachos and Sarah Lacina. Sarah has openly said that she played Survivor: Game Changers in a similar way that Tony did when he won Survivor: Cagayan. Tony is lauded as one of the most entertaining winners of all-time and Sarah gets pinpointed as a major reason for her season being considered among the more boring iterations of the franchise. Truthfully, they played a very similar game. All it comes down to is how the player presents their strategy and that’s where Tony was golden and Sarah didn’t care to go past the required point of explaining her strategy.

The truly transcendent players are those who can dominate the game with strategy but also read the tea leaves. Someone like a Cirie Fields isn’t universally loved simply because she’s a terrific Survivor player. She can also see where the story of the season as a whole is going and give production the required soundbites to help push the narrative towards its eventual conclusion. Everyone is the hero of their own story but the hero of the story that ultimately gets told is the person who relates the closest version of their own story that will match with production’s.

You might think to yourself, well what does it matter? Coach is clearly lacking in self-awareness and he directed most of his original season’s storyline. But there is a key difference. When Cirie is giving us her side of the story, the audience is expected to believe her and she is shown to be right. When Coach does it, we are shown explicitly that it’s his fabricated version of his season and we’re expected to laugh at his delusion.

In both cases, we get an entertaining product but only of those people can say they made great television and came out looking good at the end of it too.