Survivor, my jam until work took my Thursday nights

Survivor was my jam. From the very first season in the summer of 2000, I was all in, and for years it was genuine appointment television in my house.

Season one, and Sue

I watched that first season, Borneo, start to finish, and my favorite person on it was Sue Hawk. She was my favorite then and she is still my favorite now. She did not win, she landed in fourth, but she delivered the single most hardcore moment in the whole show’s history: her speech to the final two at the last tribal council, the one about the snake and the rat. If you know it, you know it. It is brutal and brilliant, and nothing since has topped it for me. Richard Hatch ended up winning that season, the original Survivor mastermind, but Sue is the one I remember.

The early run

The second season was The Australian Outback, and Tina Wesson won it. She was my favorite that year, she edged out Colby right at the end, and I thought she was great. I kept right on going from there, through Africa and the seasons after it.

The one that really sticks with me from that early stretch is Pearl Islands, in 2003. That season was loaded. It is the one with Johnny Fairplay and his infamous lie about his grandmother dying back home, which she had not, told purely to win sympathy and an advantage. One of the all-time low, all-time memorable moves.

It is also the season with Rupert Boneham, the big bearded guy in the tie-dye shirt, and I loved him. He reminded me a little of my dad, honestly. He was this caregiver type, the guy who took care of everyone, but also a natural leader who never seemed to actually want to lead. Wholesome and capable at the same time. He is one of those people you just root for.

And Pearl Islands is the one Sandra Diaz-Twine won, the first of her two titles. She has this great low-key ruthlessness to her, and she would go on to become the first person to win the whole thing twice.

Then there was All-Stars in 2004, the Rob and Amber season. Amber won it, Boston Rob came in second to her in the final vote, and the two of them got together for real, which felt like a whole event at the time.

When the bakery took over

Here is where it changed. By around 2005 I was working in the bakery at the grocery store, and Survivor aired Thursday nights at 8 on CBS, which was very often exactly when I was on shift. You cannot watch a show you are never home for, and back then there was no easy way to catch what you missed, no DVR habit, no streaming, no stack of discs. So the job quietly ended my streak. I went from never missing a week to missing most of them, and the appointment-TV part of it just fell away.

Dabbling after

After that I never fully committed to a whole season the same way again, but I did drift back for a few. I caught the seasons with Parvati Shallow, the slim, flirtatious player a lot of people wrote off as a manipulative villain. I actually thought she was fantastic and played the game brilliantly, manipulation and all. She won her own season and came within one vote of winning another, and the people calling her a bimbo badly underestimated her.

I’ll also note a fun coincidence from a season I clocked along the way: the winner of Survivor: China in 2007 was a guy named Todd Herzog. Not me. But you can imagine my reaction to seeing my own name read out as the Sole Survivor.

The one from my town

The season that means the most to me personally is Survivor: Nicaragua, in 2010, because it was won by Jud “Fabio” Birza, and Fabio grew up right here. He is from Lake St. Louis and went to the same high school I did, a year below me. I never really knew him. He was a junior when I was a senior, so we probably never shared a class, though with how senior-year math shakes out it is not impossible. What I remember is seeing him in the hallways: a preppy kid, always in Hollister, collar popped, that whole look. I did not even put it together that he was a local until the show had aired. His younger brother worked at a Steak ‘n Shake in Lake St. Louis for a while, and I would run into him there once in a while when my parents wanted to go. (I will spare you my full review of that particular Steak ‘n Shake. Let’s just say one memorably undercooked burger ended my visits.)

Fabio was a completely different person on TV than the kid I remembered from school, but I never knew him well enough to say much about that. Mostly I am just happy he won, because now I get to say an actual Survivor winner came from my town.

Would I ever go on it

I never really wanted to be on Survivor, even though, if I am honest, some small part of me always did. I knew I could handle the mental challenges. The physical ones would probably have killed me, and I had no interest in eating bugs or being on television. What I actually wanted was the experience underneath the game: going to a remote island and living for a while with no technology at all. That part still sounds kind of wonderful.

Image credits

The photos above are of the contestants themselves, not stills from the show, shared under Creative Commons licenses from Wikimedia Commons. Thank you to the contributors:

• Jonny Fairplay (Jon Dalton), by Luigi Novi / Nightscream, CC BY 3.0.
• Rupert Boneham, from the Rupert for Governor campaign, CC BY-SA 3.0.
• Sandra Diaz-Twine, by BorderlineRebel, CC0.
• Boston Rob Mariano, by Survivor Fans Pod, CC BY 3.0.
• Parvati Shallow, by Troy and/or Donna Kuretich, CC BY-SA 4.0.