During a summer workshop on television news, a Harvard professor said that "Survivor" was a "bad" show to watch. Not aesthetically bad — morally bad, unethical. A "good" parent would not let his or her kids watch "Survivor."
"How is it bad?" the professor was asked. His only reply was the compelling argument, "It's just bad!" a statement that says less about television ethics than about the academic standards at the nation's number two school.
Despite incurring the criticism of overprotective zealots, however, the first season of "Survivor" did teach some important lessons. Here are a few I observed:
Alliances breed loyalty, even once broken
At the last tribal council, all seven voters had already been eliminated from the game, so they could pick between Rich and Kelly without any further repercussions. But the Tagi Alliance still didn't break. Rudy voted for Richard because, as the ex-Navy Seal put it, "I gave him my word." Sean, the first member of the alliance voted off, stuck with Rich as well. Before Susan voted for Rich she went on a five-minute diatribe — bold and strange enough to be reprinted in The Washington Post — that blasted Kelly for breaking from the alliance. The only non-alliance member to vote for Rich was Greg, who made his decision by asking the two remaining contestants to pick a number between one and 10.
Don't bring morality where it doesn't belong
How can an alliance be immoral, as Kelly implied at the last tribal council? Yes, it plunked the poor Pagongs off the island one by one. But someone gets voted off each week. Why would ethics come into play in these decisions? If you want to avoid being selfish, then a reasonable ethical stance might be to vote off the rich people, so that the one million dollars would go to a more needy person.
Alliances aren't just "bad" by definition. If the Cold War were run like "Survivor," the day NATO voted the last Warsaw Pact country off the earth would be a national holiday. And because the alliance voted for Rich at the last tribal council, Kelly's break from the alliance probably assured her eventual loss.
Everyone loves a cantankerous old army guy
Rudy was your grandfather. Opinionated but lovable. Twenty years after Archie Bunker's bigoted yet beloved character, a raging homophobe still strikes American audiences as an appealing character. Even Rich, a homosexual, appreciated Rudy's honest expression of his feelings about homosexuality. Rudy is an example of what Robert Putnam talks about in his much-heralded book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community."
Putnam shows that the Great Depression generation was much more prone to vote in elections and join clubs, associations, political parties and civic lobbying groups than our parents, those good-for-nothing Vietnam War dodgers. In short, our grandparents were much more certain of their political opinions and created much stronger social bonds with each other, as reflected in Rudy's unyielding maxims and his nostalgia for his Navy Seal teammates.
Even the bad man can become good
Miraculously, the last show cleaned Rich's conniving image to almost spotless perfection. We hated him as late as the last immunity challenge, when he chose to sun himself on the beach while Rudy and Kelly held a pole for four hours. But at the final tribal council his poise was more appealing than Kelly's insecurity. Yes, we felt sorry for her after Susan's biting speech, but Kelly seemed too weak, too uncertain, not confident enough for us to want to hand her the check. And I bet CBS executives wet themselves with joy during Bryant Gumbel's town meeting with the cast, when Rich said he would use the money to create a program for troubled teens — a program just like the one he was in, he said, demonstrating how much his now self-assured personality must have improved since his adolescence. When "rags to riches" refers to the hero's emotional well-being as well as his bank account, the audience's approval grows.
Surviving in the real world
"Survivor" seems to be nothing more than an institutionalized, organized version of regular life. Alliances are like the communities that Putnam describes in "Bowling Alone" — clubs, associations and groups of friends, colleagues or neighbors, such as the Princeton alumni community, for example. The "voting" occurs when these communities generate success for their members — and their members only — by connecting them to jobs and giving them an active social life.
Putnam argues that social groups benefit not only group members, but society as well. Social bonds, he says, make it easier for people to find common ground on political views, motivating them to form civic groups together, thus benefiting society. "Survivor," one could argue — in both its format and outcome — demonstrated the opposite: that alliances benefit only the allies, and the most devoted ally wins out in the end. The disunited Pagongs get voted off the island and Princeton alumni get jobs while the socially disconnected don't.
Though the "Survivor" characters' dog-eat-dog tactics might scare the Harvard professor and ethics watchman, who would say that the tactics of participants in the game of life are any different? In fact, in at least one way, the real world is even scarier than "Survivor" — it isn't voluntary.
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