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.
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I'm not very into reality TV shows, so I can't give much in the way of considered or insightful comments, but this seems like an interesting idea. Of course, one of the challenges is that you don't have the other 550 hours of footage so you can't know what they're really like! It will be interesting to see how you extrapolate the biases of producers from the limited footage you have.
ReplyDeleteThe few reality shows I have watch ( I've seen a few episodes of the real world ) portray the wackiest individuals possible! I always thought they just chose the most unstable good looking characters possible, but now I'm wondering if they just use the very worst and most exciting behaviour from otherwise ordinary lives!
It might be interesting, too, to look at past seasons, to see if any of the players objected, publicly, to their portrayal on the show. It would also be interesting to consider the entire life of the show (if you've been watching awhile) to determine whether or not their are patterns of archetypes being created. Is there always a favorite? A betrayer? A bad girl? A crusty old guy? In other words, are they trying to create distinct characters or predictable types? Lots of interesting stuff to consider here.
ReplyDeleteThe rule of this reality show sounds very interesting and smart. In the past, I watched 1 or 2 reality shows in which winners were chosen by a jury made up of people who didn't participate in the show. But allowing those "losers" to select the final winner definitely creates a different dynamic that will constrain participants' behavior in the show.
ReplyDeleteI'm not quite familiar with the way that reality shows use to portray people. I'm very interested in reading your future analysis of the show.