Of course, you could argue that that's been dead for a while now, as long as noisy beefcake angel Ty Pennington has been offering three-dimensional Sears brochures to families who've been punk'd by God in increasingly awful ways. But Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has specialized in glitzy moral uplift and tastefully stone-veneered moments of introspection since its inception, whereas Survivor established its bona fides via nude Machiavellian scheming and barbecued rats.
Now, alas, the show has gotten so respectable it's conducting a daring "social experiment" that color-coordinates 20 adventurers into four racially and ethnically homogenous tribes. Why? To raise our consciousness, of course. To make us confront the thorny fact that even in 21st century America, temporary stunt segregation still flourishes in remote tropical paradises.
Or as Jeff Probst put it in a recent interview with the Associated Press:
"People are very touchy about even saying the word ‘race' or even bringing up the notion of different ethnic groups working together or maybe not working so well together. What if they don't get along? What if it's a disaster? "What if we set back the whole notion of integration? [CBS President Leslie] Moonves said, ‘Yes, I want you to do it. If you do it, I want you to do it right. Don't back off of it. Just do it.' That's all we needed to hear."
Okay, yes, that does sound like Leslie Moonves just said he wants Probst and crew to set back the whole notion of integration, and he wants them to do it right, with the adrenalin-dripping resolve of a Nike commercial. But all this really means, I'm pretty sure, is that Probst should never work without cue cards. Moonves, after all, is a major network president, and when major network presidents say, "Don't back off it," what they mean is, "Give me something I can sell to Mountain Dew. And, you know, something my ghost writer can feel proud of when he pens my memoirs ..."
Indeed, while TV critics are characterizing the show's new plot twist as Survivor: Jim Crow Edition, a fading franchise's bid to shock its way into the penthouse suite of the Nielsen ratings one last time, this interpretation says more about what TV critics think of Hollywood bigshots than what Hollywood bigshots think of themselves. Money may be their greatest motivator, but their ambition has sub-plots too.
At this point, Moonves and Survivor creator Mark Burnett must know their trusty old cash cow is a wounded beast now, easy prey for younger, hungrier predators. From the get-go, Survivor was so ritualized and repetitive each episode felt like its own rerun, and now, after 13 seasons, viewers are simply too acquainted with its tricks to embrace it with the passion they once felt. But at least Moonves and Burnett can go out on a classy note by doing something provocative and uplifting, a risky little thumbsucker that, if all goes according to plan, will generate some solemn praise from their peers at Morton's.
In other words, call it Survivor: Crash Edition.
It will have to make do without the star power of Tony Danza and Ryan Phillippe, but definitely bet on lots of evocative silences as fires rage in the vast dark night of Aitutaki. Pick up a conch shell and put it to your ear, and you may even hear Don Cheadle contemplating the dearth of human contact in LA ...
But, oh, what could have been! Burnett was truly onto something with this premise. Deployed in a different manner, it could have energized the show.
Survivor has never totally capitalized on its "tribal" conceit. The associations that unite the tribes—the things that bind them together and inspire them to do battle against their enemy—have almost always been completely arbitrary, and the one previous effort to correct that, when the tribes were split by gender, was too general to have much impact.
But what if tribes were organized in ways that emphasized shared beliefs and values, common professional training, or various other similar characteristics, then pitted against other tribes that offered an explicit contrast? Average Joe covered this territory already, of course, but it didn't exhaust it: How fun would it be, say, to watch a tribe of CEOs battle a tribe of janitors? A tribe of geriatric triathletes facing off against a tribe of youthful couch potatoes? The possibilities are endless, and yet somehow, Burnett picked the one non-starter in the bunch. For one thing, unless you cast according to stereotype, ethnicity offers no guarantee of the homogeneity, the uniformity of purpose and perspective, that would make these match-ups so dramatic. And more importantly, as Jeff Probst pointed out, people are touchy about race. A tribe of trial lawyers could opine in great detail and with complete candor about the ways in which their training and worldview prepares them for Survivor, and they could openly relish the opportunity of trouncing a bunch of health care administrators in head-to-head competition. In contrast, the show's current contestants have either dismissed ethnicity as a factor or made trivial jokes about it—it's inhibiting competition instead of enhancing it.
And, really, that's all one wants from reality TV, isn't it—entertainment, not enlightenment? As the game progresses and hunger trumps decorum, there will no doubt be an ethnically driven clash or two. (Already, the members of the Puka Puka tribe are tiring of the Asian jokes their Vietnamese teammate Cao Boi likes to tell.) But how entertaining will these dust-ups be, and what we will learn from them that All in the Family or The Facts of Life hasn't already taught us? Which is not to say that lessons about tolerance, diversity, and cultural pride are a bad thing—but frankly, one expects a lot less than that from the men who turned a show about eating live bugs for money into the crown jewel of the Tiffany network.