Every week I will be blogging about the 20th season of Survivor: Heroes v. Villains. Survivor airs on Thursdays, so I will post my blog on Fridays or as soon as NBC posts the episodes online. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Survivor the basic outline of the show is that 20 strangers of various ages and backgrounds are sent to secluded island, they participate in challenges, and vote people out until there is are three people remaining. On the last show of the season, the people who have been voted out " the jury" select the winner who receives $1 million. In the beginning of the show, the strangers are divided into two teams. The groups have been divided into teams in several different ways in the past such as by gender, age, and in my opinion the most controversial division was by race. This season the teams are heroes and villains. All of the people on the show have been on prior seasons.
I choose to blog about survivor because it portrays the power of editors and producers to create characters. The longest lasting survivors are on an island for over a month, and they are filmed almost 24 hours a day. If the survivors sleep for eight hours, and are therefore awake for 16, and last 35 days, there will be 560 hours of footage of them. A season of survivor is on average 14 episodes long and each episode is 42 minutes. Therefore each season is edited down to 9.8 hours. So the episodes that air are only approximately 1/57 of the raw footage. So clearly the producers and editors need to cut out a significant amount of the raw footage. What they choose to include is very telling. I will how racial, age, and gender stereotypes are either confirmed or disproved in the show. As well, I will explore how the media portrays heroes and villians.
