How ‘Survivor’ Explains America

During the pandemic, having made our way through much of the prestige TV on just about every streaming platform, my wife and I found ourselves turning to the 20-year-old ur-reality show “Survivor.”

You probably know the premise: Some strangers are stranded in a remote, wild place and left to fend for themselves. They compete in physical and mental challenges, first in teams and then individually. At the end of each episode, the players vote to eject one person.

The real genius comes at the end of the season. The winner of the competition and its $1 million prize is chosen from the finalists by a jury of people the contestants had voted out. The victor must, somehow, win over the people he or she previously tricked, charmed and ejected. The show had grand ambitions: Jeff Probst, the host, repeatedly referred to “Survivor” as “the greatest social experiment.”

It’s also a uniquely American experiment. As my wife and I worked our way through a dozen or so seasons, we discovered a catalog of some of the biggest social and cultural transformations of America in the past two decades — and a reflection of the values that have remained consistent.

Most strikingly, the show takes on — admittedly, in a ham-fisted way — the biggest divides in American society: gender, sexuality, race, age, class. The show’s first winner was an out gay man, not a small thing on network TV circa 2000, and has featured queer contestants throughout its run. As crude as it sounds, the season in which the producers divided contestants by race is, in many ways, more illuminating of the state of racial mores than any diversity, equity and inclusion training I have attended. It is the white competitors, not the Black, Latino or Asian American ones, who choose to stick to their own kind, even at the cost of losing the game, emblematic of the paranoia of a shrinking American white majority that often seems to prefer exclusion and decline to solidarity and progress. #MeToo arrives late in the show’s run but with a vengeance after years of sexism and allegations of sexual harassment of players (a male player was ejected in 2019 amid accusations of inappropriate touching), and Probst seems to have finally acknowledged that he had for years favored male contestants, praising their strategic gameplay and physical prowess while overlooking or criticizing women who played aggressively.

Over the years, themes and unwritten rules emerge: Be loyal but not blindly so. One of the most admired and rewarded feats on “Survivor” is the blindside: voting off someone who thinks you are an ally. Bonus points for doing it with such finesse that even the victim cannot help but marvel and rue not having thought of blindsiding you first. It is, above all, a parable of success in America: Winning means being strong but not too strong, standing out by blending in, being smart but not too smart. Dissembling and deceitful but in a way that the ones you betray can’t help but admire you.

But the show also reveals something else that seems fundamentally American. As the sociologist Erving Goffman argued long before the advent of reality television, we are all engaged in a “presentation of self” on a stage of our own making, shaped by the audiences that observe us. “Survivor” reminds us that living in our panopticon, with cameras in every pocket, we are content creators all, delivering a performance of ourselves.