Threadlines: Survivor was as big as The Super Bowl

Any Given Wednesday

Every Wednesday at 7 pm, I and millions worldwide sit down to watch the newest episode of Survivor. This reality television series that pits a group of contestants against each other in a survival and strategy competition has a long and storied history.

Over the 45+ (yes you read that right) seasons of the show, viewers at home have seen hundreds of contestants producing thousands of fascinating moments as they live together on the island together.

The premise of Survivor is that a group of castaways are taken from their normal lives in America and plopped onto a remote island, which could be anywhere scattered across the globe. The Survivor castaways have been marooned on islands in countries such as Fiji, China, Panama, or Thailand for weeks on end.

During their time on the island, the contestants must work together to survive the elements, build shelter, and find food. It's a reality show that highlights the bonds that humans forge with one another amidst extreme situations and how they react to challenges.

Often, when I mention that I watch the show, I receive reactions ranging from confusion to intrigue regarding the fact that the show is still airing.

Survivor recently completed its 45th season, and it shows no plans of stopping, with the premier of the 46th season airing this past week.

This massive number of seasons means the show holds the crown for the reality TV show with the most seasons and is one of the television industry's longest-running shows.
Despite this longevity, the show is only continuing to grow, with CBS extending its TV time block from 60 to 90 minutes for the foreseeable future.

What is Survivor?

Survivor is, at its core, a social engineering experiment. This is because the primary conflict that drives Survivor, amidst the physical challenges, shelter building, and getting along with a bunch of strangers, is that the cast must vote someone each other off the show. In each episode, every castaway casts a vote for who they want to leave the island, and whichever contestant receives the most votes is booted.

With this, the group is slowly whittled down, until only one "Sole Survivor" remains, claiming the grand prize of a million dollars.

This million-dollar prize has drawn hundreds of interesting contestants to the show to try and outwit, outplay, and outlast each other in search of winning the game.

There is much to say about how the competitive meta of the show has evolved over the years, evolving from an unstructured social experiment to a strategic combination of game theory and maneuvering rife with game items like immunity idols and "safety without power" advantages.

Survivor has changed in many, many ways, but at its core, the show is anchored to one fascinating premise - drop a group of strangers onto an island, instruct them to vote each other off with a million dollars waiting for the winner, and see how it plays out.

In 2023, despite live television becoming less and less relevant, Survivor has maintained a cult following, with millions tuning in weekly, discussing the show, developing contestant tier lists, and trying to predict the winner.

However, it used to be a much, much bigger deal than just a reality TV show with a cult following. It used to be as big as the Super Bowl.

So, today, I want to turn back time to when Survivor started. Going back to the turn of the millennium, let's look at the first season of Survivor, how the game was created, and how it became an instant, global phenomenon.

How did Survivor get started?

In the mid 1990s, Charlie Parsons was at a party in Los Angeles.

Parsons is a television producer who had been trying, unsuccessfully, for a few years to get Western television studios to buy into his new show idea that involved sending a group of normal people to an island to live together.

As Parsons remembers, he was building off a TV show he produced previously that was "called Network 7. It was a magazine show aimed at under thirty-fours, and I was its Series Editor. We had the idea of sending four people to a remote place with very little and seeing how they got on: we sent a soap-opera star, a famous tennis player, a stockbroker and an ex-criminal.
They went to an island off Sri Lanka, and we filmed it over a few weeks. There were no games or tasks, just a crew following them. It was great to watch."

However, this show would ultimately be short-lived, but Parsons wanted to turn it into something bigger, more regular, and more serialized, and he wanted to bring it to American audiences.
This was where he was running into trouble.

Again, Parsons recalls, "But when it came to it, the US networks loved the idea but thought it too risky. They had never seen a show like this—it didn’t fall into any normal category. It wasn’t an entertainment show set in a studio, it wasn’t a documentary, it wasn’t a drama. It’s difficult to remember the days pre-reality TV, but this really broke the mold—but too much for the buyers."

Then, back to that party at LA, where Parsons meets Mark Burnett.

Burnett is the producer of the genre-breaking, successful show called the Eco-Challenge. This show is an adventure, reality show that pits contestants against each other in a worldwide expedition race.
Think something pretty similar to its spiritual successor, The Amazing Race.

The Eco-Challenge was pretty successful in and of itself, but more importantly, it inspired an appetite in American watchers for an outdoor-based reality competition.

So, with this in his back pocket, Parsons strikes up a conversation with Burnett. Throughout this night, Parsons' dream to air his idea for a reality survival show comes up. Burnett loves it and decides then and there that he wants to make it happen.

If Mark Burnett was good at one thing, he was good at getting executives excited about his show. ¹ So, as he made his tours to all the influential producers, the idea of this survival island show began to catch on, and before the duo knew it... it was happening.
CBS's drama development head, Ghen Maynard, took a shine to the show, and after he pushed the show up the ladder to CBS's president, they got the green light.

The next steps were setting out to get a crew, a host, and a cast. The crew was relatively simple to procure, with CBS' wealth of resources and connections. It’s worth noting that many of the crew came from Burnett's experience on The Eco-Challenge, as the skills required to produce an outdoor, reality show were pretty niche, so it only made sense to bring them over.

When it came to finding a host for the show, we arrived at another highly fortunate moment for Parsons and Burnett. As the story goes, "Jeff Probst was driving on the 405 in Los Angeles when he heard Burnett talking about Survivor on the radio." Then, "he immediately pulled over, ran to the nearest payphone, and called his agent to get him an audition."

Probst was an immediate fit, and he showed a lot of passionate interest into the show. He was much more than a talking head - Probst sat in on producer meetings, sought to understand every detail of the production, and then brought all of that information into his role as host.

But perhaps most notably, the show needed a cast. Who were the people that viewers were going to watch live on this beach? They needed to be a balance between being interesting personalities but also being authentic.

The show would not succeed unless viewers bought into the idea - that these people were real, normal Americans who were really surviving on this island together.

The First Castaways

This is where Lynne Spillman came in. Spillman was the casting director for Burnett's Eco-Challenge, so she had experience casting for this kind of show. But this new show posed a different challenge in that it was much less of a physical, race-style competition, and more of a social experiment, acutely focused on the people.

Alongside the other producers, Spillman began to devise a new set of casting goals, hoping to recruit a diverse set of cast members. Diverse in all senses of the word, setting out to find a group of Americans who could act as a microcosm for the country as a whole.

As word got around about the casting call for the show, the production team received a few thousand applications. Spillman recalls, "We did get a lot of survivalist types at first. I think that was mostly because Mark’s circle was from Eco-Challange and other adventure races, and that’s who the word got out to first. With the local affiliates helping us spread the word, eventually, the message of 'the show is for all types of people' got out."

The casting process was unorthodox and unexpected. Upon receiving a callback, applicants went through a multiple-round interview process with the production team.
But, instead of asking them questions you might expect during a television casting process about how they're going to relate with potential audiences or even questions about their survivalist abilities, the applicants were asked about how they interacted with people different from them.

As Gretchen Cordy, an eventual cast member on the season recalls that she was asked "‘If you found out the person you were sleeping next to was a lesbian, what would you do?' The nature of the questions quickly had me coming to the realization that this was no Eco-Challenge."

As the producers whittled the cast down from thousands to a final group, they found themselves looking at a wildly diverse cast. Not just diverse in ethnicity or gender, but also in life experience, reason for being on the show, and creed.

They had folks like Sean who quit his private neurology practice in NYC on a whim, hoping to travel and experience the world. Sean decided to apply after seeing an ad for casting in a magazine and figured "I had nothing else to do in two-and-a-half months."
Sean the former neurologist stood next to cast member Joel who remembers "I showed up to my interview very hungover... I played an aggressive lothario that was on a constant conquest for the next woman. It worked all the way through casting."

This was a group of 16 people who were all wildly different from each other, and that was exactly what the producers wanted.

And so, to Maylasia they go, to the soon-to-be-iconic island of Borneo.

Survivor on Location in Borneo

As the cast and crew flew to Southeast Asia, they were all unsure how to feel. A combination of excitement and anticipation was mixed with a healthy dose of uncertainty. All of this was new to everyone involved.

The cast was going to have to quickly get used to having their every moment filmed and recorded, and the crew was going to quickly adapt to producing a full television show while in the challenging conditions of a literal island in the Pacific Ocean.

On top of all of that, the cast was directed not to talk or interact with one another until the game officially began on the island.

So, you have a random assortment of Americans silently sitting in a tiny airplane, all ready to be stranded with each other for the next 39 days. This weird scene came to an abrupt end as arrived on the remote, dangerous, and beautiful island of Pulau Tiga - which would become their home. And just like that, Survivor was born.

Survivor’s First Season

There is much to say about what went on over the next 39 days. But here is a largely insufficient recap:

The 16 castaways began with expectations of living out a survivalist experience alongside one another. The dominant expectation shared by the cast was that Survivor was going to be a long but fun experience on the island, where they would be focused on learning how to live on an island alongside one another, learn to fish, build a fire, make a campsite, and more.

But, within 3 days of the marooning, all of those dynamics were completely transformed as the group had to vote someone off the show. Gretchen Cordy recalled "When we voted out B.B., I felt like vomiting... With each vote, someone’s dream ended."²  

Now, everyone was acutely aware that they didn't want to be the next person voted out. So the focus on survival quickly shifted to a focus on strategy and social positioning as each castaway fought to ensure they would move forward in the game.

Some, like Joel Klug quickly realized that this was really just going to come down to numbers, as he tried to drum up the show's first-ever group of survivors who would vote together, hoping to secure his place in the game.

Survivor as a competitive game rapidly continued to evolve.
Soon, there were strategic terms like "alliance" being thrown around by contestants like Richard Hatch, who "surrounded himself with people he thought he could control and eventually beat. That is why he teamed up with Kelly [Wigglesworth], Sue [Hawk], and Rudy."

Some castaways like Sean Evans eschewed strategic maneuvers in favor of a more laissez-faire, "politically innocuous" approach, voting for people in alphabetical order, trying not to make any enemies.

But as the season progressed, those thinking about strategy continued to move forward, as they voted out their castmates who were more focused on other elements of the experience.

Again, Gretchen recalls that "Rich [Hatch] said multiple times, 'I’m not here to make friends,' and I suppose that’s what it takes." Moreover, "I have often thought, in retrospect, that had I been on the second season, I would have had an entirely different mindset. Everyone would know what was coming—that all the things that weren’t fair and hurtful in 'real life' were allowed. Lying to someone’s face was acceptable. Ganging up on the odd man out was just part of the game."

Ianic Roy Richard, an independent sports writer reflected on the dawn of Survivor strategy, "Many contestants realized that alliances and strategizing would be the key to victory but were too afraid to meddle in it. Nobody knew how people would react to players ganging up together to vote out specific people instead of voting out who was perceived as 'least deserving'. The potential blowback in forming an alliance had scared a lot of people away from even trying it. Not Rich though, he didn’t really worry about how he would be perceived. He figured he could take a stranglehold on the game and he did."

These comments proved apt.
Before long, the cast was whittled down until the final four standing were Richard Hatch, Kelly Wigglesworth, Sue Hawk, and Rudy Boesch.

After Sue, and then Rudy were voted off by Kelly and Rich, we got to the first-ever final two.

In a 4-3 vote, Richard Hatch was chosen by the jury to be the inaugural Survivor winner and recipient of the $1 million prize.³

Airing Survivor: Borneo

As they all returned to the States, the producers reflected on what had just transpired.

Maria Baltazzi, one of the show's producers recalls that "the forming of alliances was something I had not anticipated happening. However, when that turn occurred, I thought it made for unexpected and compelling storytelling. In my mind, it was this turn that made Survivor become a social experiment."

They didn't get the show that they expected, but what they filmed and the stories that were told during the past 39 days were much more exciting and much more human.

Now to turn that into a full-fledged show.

Martin Holmes for Inside Survivor writes "The turnaround between the end of filming and the premiere date was just over a month. Television promos had started airing on CBS promising the 'wildest show in television history.' Howard Stern was hyping it up on his radio show. TV critics across America were sharpening their machetes. There was a gut-churning mix of excitement and apprehension."

Despite all the press, some of the crew weren't that hopeful, predicting the show might just be a "flash-in-the-pan" and maybe "mildly interesting but a little silly and frivolous."

Others were much more bullish, predicting that viewers would love it, even going so far as to create a mock cover (seen below) for Time magazine that highlighted the roaring success of Survivor.

I'm sure you can guess which group was right.

By the airing of just the third episode of the season, Survivor had already become the biggest show in the United States.

The cast expected that their appearance on a new, probably niche, nature-based reality show would maybe be watched by a few people around the country, but they instead quickly found themselves plunged into the spotlight.

Soon, contestants were getting recognized in grocery stores, getting fan mail, and appearing on talk shows. One castaway, Colleen Haskell, was even cast in an Adam Sandler movie as a result of the notoriety she gained from the show.

To the cast, becoming overnight celebrities was wildly unexpected, for better or for worse.

Gretchen remembers that time in her family's life with chagrin, "We couldn’t eat out anymore. I went grocery shopping at the commissary, and they made an announcement over the loudspeaker that I was there, and I signed autographs for two hours while my ice-cream melted and meat got warm."

On the other hand, Gervase recalls his experience being "amazing. Going to the award shows, the parties, the charity events, appearances, speaking engagements. Doing TV shows, modeling, commercials, video games, trading cards, radio, you name it, we did it. The best part was all the love from fans all over the world."

For the season's final episode, over 50 million people tuned in live to find out the winner. It's hard to overstate how proliferate Survivor was in American culture.
One online poster recalls "I was in 4th grade and EVERYONE in my class watched Survivor. We would all arrive to school the next day after the episodes aired and talk about them."

Others describe the first season of Survivor as a "touchstone of the cultural zeitgeist" and "water cooler talk” and remember that they saw an episode of the season in a live airing at a movie theater.

Furthermore, The Chicago Tribune reported that the finale drew more viewers than "all telecasts in the last television season but the Super Bowl" and was viewed by more than 28% of all homes in the nation.

Survivor was everywhere.

Not only was it the first show of it's kind, but it took hold of American consciousness in such a way that was typically reserved for topics like professional sports and A-list celebrities.

Reflecting on the origin of Survivor

Casting director Lynne Spillman remembers "I was thrilled and shocked after season one at the massive cultural phenomenon it became. It was really reflected in season two when we had over seventy thousand people apply to be on the show."

The producers capitalized on this success with a quick release of the second season, Survivor: Australian Outback.

This season saw similar success, with Survivor continuing as the biggest show on television and again catapulting the season's contestants into public attention.

The show's release also transformed the landscape of the television industry, giving rise to an entire new genre of "challenge reality shows", that attempted to recreate the Survivor formula of putting everyday people through a series of challenges together in some sort of real competition.

In a fantastic research paper titled "Keeping It Real: A Historical Look at Reality TV" Jessica Roberts writes:

After Survivor, viewers across the United States became enamored with reality television and the unequivocally real stories that the medium has the potential to tell.

However, due to a myriad of factors, mostly consistently attributed to the 9/11 tragedy drawing the country's attention to more important matters, reality TV across the board saw a massive drop in popularity in the next few years. As a result, the following Survivor seasons also suffered in ratings.

They were still well-viewed and well-received, but they did not reach the level of ‘mainstay of American culture’ that seasons 1 and 2 reached.

Despite this, Survivor continued.
The show was still successful enough to justify airing 2 seasons a year, every year.

And at the time of writing, Survivor is still going.

It's also spawned many sister shows internationally, including Australian Survivor, Expeditie Robinson in The Netherlands, Koh-Lanta in France, and Survivor South Africa, just to name a few.

By all markers, it's one of the most commercially successful television - not just reality TV - shows of all time. It's also created legions of fans who discuss, follow, and cheer for it every single season.

As Charlie Parsons eloquently put, "Survivor is about heroes, it’s a testament to the human spirit, what we can do, and what our flaws are. Everyone can identify with it—they can see themselves there."

This astonishing breadth of impact and longevity is a testament to the way Survivor's contestants and the stories within continue to capture the attention of the public.

However, it has never again reached the incredible highs of its premiere. We may never see anything like Survivor's first season. For a few months in the early 2000s, those sixteen castaways were as well-known and recognizable as the President.

Americans gathered around their televisions to watch ordinary people live together on an island in the Pacific Ocean, vote one another off the show, and compete for a million dollars.

It was a fascinating, unforeseen phenomenon, and twenty-four years later, we can look back and realize how Survivor changed the fabric of the lives of so many.

¹ According to his Wikipedia page, “Burnett has produced more than 3,200 hours of television programming which regularly airs in more than 70 countries.” Including Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, Shark Tank, The Voice, and The Apprentice.

² Note that B.B. was not the show’s first vote-out. That unwelcome accomplishment belonged Sonja Christopher of the Tagi tribe.
B.B. was simply the Pagong tribe’s first vote-out, which is why Gretchen speaks of that boot specifically.

³ This quick recap doesn't cover iconic stories that captured viewer's attention like Richard Hatch walking around camp in the nude, Sue’s instantly iconic “Rats and Snakes” speech at final tribal council, and the old, ex-Navy Seal Rudy striking up an unlikely friendship with the brash, gay Richard.