Word: survivor
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...this narcissism or catharsis? It's hard to tell the difference nowadays, but several VTV veterans explain their decisions to bare all in the language of therapy and personal growth. Survivor contestant Sonja Christopher, 63, was already a survivor--of breast cancer--and signed on as a way of moving on. "I had been through a lot in the past two years," she says. "Following this fantasy, doing this crazy thing, was a way to try to heal myself. It was a survival instinct." "I felt suffocated and trapped in the life I was in," says The Real World...
...Brother. "Even when the game isn't interesting, you wait and stay because the next hit could be a home run." True, arguments over who's hogging the rat meat are probably not what Aristotle had in mind when conceiving the Poetics. And producers can contrive conflict, such as Survivor's races and bug-eating contests, not to mention its million-dollar endgame. (Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, author of The Argument Culture, says this "shows that the programmers don't think human interaction itself is dramatic.") But Survivor functions as drama, if not art, because...
...public. "People stop me in the street and say, 'I really related to your character,'" says Real World vet Kevin Powell, 33. "I wasn't a character. That was me." And these noncelebrity celebrities tend to be bite-size stars, celebrity snacks whom the public down in one gulp. Survivor spins off a new star every week as the contestants are voted off; each makes a weeklong round of the press--all to stoke the ratings of the bastards who eighty-sixed them!--and then flames out. "I'm so tired," Stillman said the day after her expulsion aired...
...opening title card read An American Family, and then the words cracked and fell to the bottom of the screen," she says. "We all just looked at each other and said, 'Uh-oh.'" Lance, who parlayed his notoriety into a writing career, says his father Bill, 79, called Survivor "No. 1 on my must-not-see list...
...science professor at York University in Canada and author of The End of Privacy (New Press; $25). "These shows are a kind of acting out of the mingled fascination and fear that surrounds this, a way of playing it out in a kind of harmless way." For some, anyway. Survivor rates best with the young and the well-off--those who grew up with computers as helpers and playmates, those who use "nannycams" to watch the hired help from the office monitor. Where you stand on VTV, it seems, largely depends on where you stand on technology...