TV Made me Stupid

Oh my God, I love Survivor.  It's been an on again / off again affair (Mainly off) but I have once again fallen in love with it's unique brand of lowest common denominator entertainment.

I was an avid fan of its first few seasons.  I think that a warning flag went up for Elisabeth early in our relationship when I'd insist spending Friday evening at my mom's place watching a recording of Wednesday's episode of Survivor because the TV I had didn't get the channel that it aired on.

Then England happened and Survivor and I drifted apart and I had a passionate but ultimately unrewarding dalliance with Big Brother.  We didn't reconnect until recently, now that I have a lot more time in the evenings and weekends thanks to Henry's presence and online TV.

So a few weeks ago I sank into the morass of Survivor 21: Heroes vs. Villains and re-discovered a lost love.  In the first episode a toe was broken, a shoulder dislocated and a bikini top maliciously ripped off a piece of anorexic eye candy.  It was my grade eleven prom all over again.

There has been a dynamic shift in the mechanics of the game with the contestants hyper-awareness of the history of the game, strategies which have worked, failed, worked then failed, failed then worked and a meta-meta reality/ entertainment/ manipulation through editing and/or competitions and fucks deliciously with the contestants heads and viewers expectations.

Season 22 is gearing up to be a good one.  It feels like the first two episodes were the best first two ever, due to the selection of at least three sociopaths, two personality disorders, one full on nut-nut and and an evangelical Christian who is already food for the lions.

If reality TV is supposed to hold a mirror to ourselves and/or our society (Really, who believes this other than studio execs and the producers of this exploitive dreck.), Survivor continues to outdo itself by putting on display the kind of greedy, capitalistic paranoid over-thinkers with no sense of self awareness or shame that will do anything for money.  These are the people who own businesses, buy up property and run corporations.  For me, it's endless hours of entertainment watching them scheme, screw each other over, be manipulated and, ultimately eat each other alive (Figuratively - though we all know what being 'voted off' really means.) for the sake of an anti-human ideology.