A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[It's a real-time Lord of the Flies
By ED FEUER -- Winnipeg Sun
June 10, 2000
What passes for entertainment these days is bizarre. Such as Reality TV, a concept which seems to have sprung from all those supposed real-life, camera sites on the Internet.
CBS's Survival is the current darling of Reality-TV. Pioneer Quest: A Year in The Real West, which will be filmed locally, will follow in similar footsteps.
But doing the pioneer thing is a harmless pursuit compared with Survivor.
One could write the show off as just another heat in the race for the bottom in TV's wasteland. But Survivor carries unsavoury messages.
The program offers the gullible a cross between the get-ahead tactics of office politics to the dirty dealings of a police state.
Gilligan's Island, it ain't.
During 13 one-hour weekly episodes, 16 "castaways" living in two "tribes" on an island off Borneo will be seen indulging in the various antics they perpetrated for 39 days. The group will be whittled down to two people through "tribal councils." The last survivor will win $1 million.
The remainder receive prizes said to range from $2,500 for the first person exiled from the island by his colleagues to $100,000 for the runner-up.
You need to exercise your usual suspension of disbelief when it comes to how the participants manage to keep looking so good for TV.
But it's the whittling-down of the contestants that's disturbing.
Even a Canadian can tell it's a downright un-American process.
In ABC's Making The Band reality series, aspiring members of a boy band put each other down in front of the camera and out of earshot of the others. But it's the impresario who gives them the hook.
In Survivor, the backstabbing goes into overdrive, and it's the castaways who vote to exile themselves.
If these were real castaways, problems would somehow be worked out. But the show needs the tension that precedes the forced departure of an individual every week. The producers help things along by keying in on a few people with unpopular behaviours.
They ask castaways to make on-camera comments about others for the camera away from the targeted individuals. This builds to the crescendo of so-called "tribal councils" which convene after competitions between the two tribes.
This week's contest involved devouring big, fat slugs, something that made the notion of eating Manitoba's puny tent caterpillars easy.
Playing to American sensibilities about democracy, the producers term the sessions "tribal councils." But there is no debate during the councils.
Even during Red Guard self-criticism sessions in Communist China, the accusations were made in public before the offender was taken away. But Survivor's denunciations are made behind the victim's backs.
Some of the less history-challenged out there might yell, "Show trials!" And start thinking of Stalin, Saddam or Iran.
In Survivor, each participant leaves the group and approaches the waiting camera, the equivalent of the Russian KGB or East German Stasi man to whom the snitch informs. The castaway conducts a brief harangue against the team member who's earned his or her hostile ballot.
No due process, no defence.
Survivor's reality is repugnant.
Yes, there will be a survivor but what kind of survivor will he or she be?
Other than a million dollars richer.
Ed Feuer is a Winnipeg Sun copy editor; reach him at editor@wpgsun.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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