The Survivor Race Experiment

This blog is a responce to the readings ‘A Racy Twist for “Survivor” by Gina Serpe. This article discusses the recent season of the succesful ”Survivor” series where the producers made the decision to divide the tribes in to 4 seperate racially divided camps. These were the caucasion, hispanic, afican-american, and asian-american groups. To me this risky move raises the question, is it appropriate to exploit racial tensions in order to raise TV ratings?

The survivor producers are defending any criticism of this idea by stating that “The idea for this actually came from the criticism that Survivor was not ethnically diverse enough, because for whatever reason, we always have a low number of minority applicants apply for the show.” ’Let’s turn this criticism into creative for the show. I think it fits in perfectly with what ‘Survivor’ does — it is a social experiment.” While this is truly a social experiment it’s ultimate tastefullness all depends on how the show progresses and what events and footage they decide to show. As long as they do not misconstrue comments or otherwise try to cause controversy along racial lines I don’t think they are really doing anything innapropriate. It is no worse than previous series where contestants were divided along age or sex lines.

Some may disagree with my opinion. They may feel that this is a return to the segregation of the past. They may feel that this may cause further divisiveness in the population as different ethnic groups presumably support their own representatives.  These people may also argue that CBS is crossing the boundaries of Political correctness by not recognizing the contestants as individuals but as units of a race. While these counter arguments may hold some truth I feel that CBS is entirely within their rights to explore their creative freedoms for the show. Viewers still have the choice to seperate themselves along racial lines of support.

People should also not assume this segregation will result in a negative. I am anxious to see what cultural characteristics will help each group survive. I’m looking forward to learning how different  sub-cultures communicate, overcome, and compete and then analyzing to see what valuable lessons can be taken from the show.

There is also the issue of how the contestants feel about being seperated by their race. Here is a clip from the show that shows a number of comments and concerns from the players about how they feel about this seperation.

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBhBW7She48&mode=related&search= ]

It is quite clear from these comments that many of the contestants are wary of the idea and how things will be percieved by the audience.

All the hype and concern eventually proved to be overdone as the tribes all merged after the second episode anyways. http://www.showbuzz.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/29/tv_realty_tv/main2052186.shtml

This was to the best of my knowledge not really explained by CBS.

My conclusions on this interesting issue is that CBS was not out of bounds to seperate their contestants along racial lines. The idea itself did generate alot of hype which led to higher ratings than the previous season. I watched a number of episodes from the season and they did not try to reinforce any negative stereotypes or try to instigate racial conflict beyond the scope of the competition in the game. CBS acted controversially but ultimately responsible enough to gain my approval for their idea for a new twist to their show.