Word: survivors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Estimated ratings for the luxuriously padded two-hour finale were 20 percent off last year's Neil Armstrong numbers - and estimated water-cooler chatter on Friday morning was off 30 percent - but "Survivor 2: The Sequel" still beat NBC's stunt-studded "Friends" handily on a weekly basis and still gets more people talking than any network show out there. ("Back From the Outback," a where-are-they-now cleanup show charged with sopping up the last of CBS' May-sweeps spoils next week, may finally yield to the aging Peacock gang.) Here's management's leverage in the Hollywood...
...Because she helped transport entertainment into the realm of news (see MSNBC.com, abcnews.com and CNN.com), because she won the million bucks, and because while the novelty of cramming 16 castaways onto some deserted isle has now officially left the building - and Tina Wesson was certainly no Richard Hatch - "Survivor 2" was still a big deal in this TV nation of ours...
...when it comes to Reality TV, "Survivor" is still king. What is it about this show? There's the high-school-flashback factor, getting to watch alliances form and shift and disintegrate according to social winds none of us have ever fully understood. There's the simple lure of schadenfreude, getting to cackle on the couch as 16 Real, Ordinary People are stranded far from civilization and have to scratch, claw and starve their way to 15 runners-up and one winner. (And there's the "bah" factor. "Bah," we say. "Can't these people even catch a fish...
...Last season CBS had the market cornered, rolling out "Survivor" and "Big Brother" and coming up with one phenomenon and one dud. The rest of television spent the summer boning up, and since then "The Mole" came and quietly went, "Temptation Island" drew viewers but scared away advertisers, "The Weakest Link" took "Survivor"-style ruthlessness into the lavish confines of the game-show studio, and "Boot Camp" proved that slavish imitation of a business model can still pay off in this business...
...Survivor 3" will be here before you know it. Probst will be back, with 16 ambitious new castaways in tow, camped out for 43 days in some faraway place (the word is, Africa). It won't be quite as breathless as "Survivor 2" - would the second season be as big as the first? - which in turn wasn't as breathless as "Survivor 1," which wasn't going to be an easy act to follow anyway...