Word: survivor
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...Court TV needs a tag line, they can call it "Survivor 1.5." In an apparent effort to confirm yet another of America's stereotypes about lawyers, Stacey Stillman has reacted to losing the first "Survivor," months after the fact, by suing. Specifically, Stillman alleges that two other contestants - Sean Keniff and Dirk Been - were spoken to by producers, which led them to vote her off the island, which in turn meant the contest was rigged. (Keniff has denied the charge; Been neither confirms nor denies...
...competing tribes lost their members at more or less the same rate. On the other hand, Stillman's postulate that CBS wanted to keep crusty septuagenarian Rudy Boesch to hang on to older viewers - the most actively despised demographic in television - is weird, to say the least. (CBS bought "Survivor" largely to win a younger audience.) Being a rank legal amateur, I'll leave it to trained professionals - or another set of legal rank amateurs drawn from the San Francisco jury pool - to decide whether Stacey has a case. But her lawsuit raises a couple of interesting questions. What constitutes...
...This might or might not add up to something immoral, unsporting or even illegal. But follow it to its logical end, and the implication is: altering the social dynamic in a way that changes votes amounts to rigging. But "Survivor," and its followers, are social game shows - you win because a variety of factors cause your tribemates to vote one way or another. And any number of acts by the producers can do that. Choosing who goes in which tribe, for instance; or assigning physical challenges, which work against the weaker. Asking interview questions that dredge up hostilities...
...wasn't the only disappointment of Week Two of "Survivor: Back to the Outback." The contestants are really starting to sound like they'd watched all the tapes of "Survivor 1" before they got on the plane, and the cattiness we're supposed to eat up like pasty rice really sounds forced. Frankly, gross-out Wheel of Gastronomical Misfortune or not, at about the halfway point the director's-cut 40-minute "Friends" with George Costanza was awfully appetizing, clicker-wise...
...groups have little in common. Survivors' associations have accused the government of milking international sympathy over the genocide for political gain while failing to adequately care for those who suffered. Meanwhile, the speaker of parliament, a Tutsi genocide survivor, has sought asylum abroad, alleging that corruption charges against him were trumped up. The vice president of Ibuka (meaning "Remember!" in Kinyarwanda), the leading survivors' association, also fled the country early last year after his brother was assassinated by men in military uniform...