Reasons Survivor Is Fake

“Survivor” arrived on American television in the summer of 2000 with a premise so novel, audacious, and compelling that it instantly became one of the most-watched shows around and virtually launched the contemporary concept of reality television. The CBS show seemingly takes about two dozen regular people from all walks of life and dumps them into a remote, rugged, but warm and beautiful locale. Once there, they use their wits to survive the elements, make alliances, and navigate gameplay so as to win a big cash prize at the end.

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But “Survivor” isn’t a documentary; it is a reality show. The difference is that producers and editors carefully craft a narrative, both by the obstacles and challenges they set up for contestants to face, and then compile a story out of what they film. The goal of “Survivor” isn’t to depict a real-life situation and gain some insight into the human condition — it’s to make eminently watchable and highly dramatic television. Each iteration of “Survivor” plays into a formula crafted over more than 25 years on the air. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes to make “Survivor” what it is. Here are all of the ways that “Survivor” is slightly fictionalized reality television.

One of the first steps at the beginning of each production cycle on “Survivor” is determining what contestants will vie for the grand prize by braving the great outdoors on television. Producers solicit and sift through tens of thousands of applications from “Survivor” fans and viewers, and people who just want to be on TV, but the vast majority of those entries don’t result in a casting. Liking “Survivor” or having survival skills isn’t enough to actually get a person onto “Survivor,” nor are the resumes from most applicants.

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Because their main goal is to make riveting television, “Survivor” producers have to go out and find for themselves the kind of people that make excellent reality show participants, namely those that have some sort of media training or cultivated charisma. As they’re a part of the broader television industry, “Survivor” creators have access to a talent pool of actors and models — which they internally call “mactors.” This is why so many “Survivor” finalists’ jobs are listed on-screen as actors and models — because they are. This doesn’t mean they’re acting on “Survivor,” only that they know how to handle themselves in front of a camera, or that they can endure the disturbing things that happen on reality shows.

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It would be an unmitigated disaster if anyone on “Survivor” were to die during filming of a season on some distant island somewhere. It would rank among the biggest scandals to ever hit CBS if a death occurred on its flagship reality show, and it would likely result in lawsuits or an investigation into criminality or negligence if a contestant died a preventable death while cameras rolled and numerous crew members stood by and didn’t help. From the standpoint of keeping human safety at the forefront, “Survivor” has to be just a little bit less than authentic.

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While they’re supposed to be shown in the wilderness doing things like building fires and shelter, finding water, getting food, and other life-sustaining measures, nobody is going to let contestants die of exposure, thirst, or hunger. That would turn “Survivor” into a dumb game show someone should’ve been fired for.  According to Reality Blurred, after her time on “Survivor: Tocantins,” Erinn Lobdell divulged that a camera operator helped her light a much-needed fire with the help of a lighter. “Survivor: Africa” competitor Kelly Goldsmith revealed that her whole tribe had been given matches. Mookie Lee of “Survivor: Fiji” said that while an episode showed him using a pair of glasses to get a fire going, a lighter had actually done the trick.

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The producers of “Survivor” don’t really want to test extremes, like seeing how long regular people can go without water, or sustain the lowest temperature a human can actually survive. They just want to make light and inspirational entertainment about people overcoming the odds to thrive in a strange and intimidating environment. And all that footage of hunting, fishing, and foraging is totally real and not scripted: Contestants are tasked with finding their own food by whatever methods they wish. But they’re not left completely on their own to, well, survive.

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The “Survivor” crew makes small concessions and provides jumpstarts to contestants to help them get by in the wilderness, at least at first. Upon arriving at the shooting location, each contestant receives a guidebook loaded with vital information on what local plants are edible and not, what animal and fish species can be eaten or should be avoided, and how to maintain hygiene while far from modern conveniences, which is important to maintaining personal health. Whether the contestants actually consult those books, and off camera, of course, is entirely up to them.

Most every “Survivor” episode features a dramatic build-up to an important challenge that will likely lead to the worst-performing contestant facing elimination. Many spine-chilling things have been caught by drones, but on “Survivor,” flying cameras build drama and tension for the challenge with overhead shots of contestants dutifully and seriously walking to the contest spot, and then waiting around for the game to actually begin. It’s hard to make out the details of the contestants’ faces or the nuances of their body language, because the camera is so far away. That’s necessary, because those aren’t the real “Survivor” contestants on-screen, standing around: Those are body doubles in the employ of the production.

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Challenges are a complicated thing to film, and they involve huge teams of crew members, participating in camera work, sound work, or waiting to provide medical assistance, if necessary. If fly-by cameras depicted the actual lead-up to the challenges, they’d grab not only footage of contestants but all the crew members, too, which would immediately break the audience’s suspension of disbelief and show that “Survivor” competitors aren’t alone in the wild. The show uses a small group of body doubles known on the set as the “Dream Team,” and they’re an athletic bunch who also practice the challenges to make sure they’re not too dangerous and also competitive.

“Survivor” challenges seem to move along at a rapid, almost concerning, clip. As far as viewers are concerned, it looks like contestants are ill-prepared, or at least hastily-prepared, for the physically taxing challenges and games to which they’re subjected each episode, with the prizes being advantages in the overall competition. They appear to learn what the game is all about at the same time as viewers, with host Jeff Probst quickly describing what’s about to happen. And then, they’re on their marks and getting ready to jump, run, dive, or execute another sudden action, all with what looks like little to no practice.

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Those challenges are complicated, and the production makes sure that contestants are both safe and know what they’re about to endure. After Probst is filmed giving the instructions, all the competitors get a detailed walk-through that explains every element of the game. Tribes can even ask questions or discuss group strategies in this pre-challenge period. There’s also an employee of CBS’s standards and practices sector overseeing the prep process to ensure an equal distribution of information and thus a fair fight.

A big part of crafting a narrative arc for each “Survivor” season involves ascribing different character archetypes to most contestants. One big way that producers can instantly convey certain traits about different competitors, and how they want those people to be viewed, is through wardrobe. This is so vital to the fabric of the show that it’s reportedly written into “Survivor” contestants’ contracts that producers can dress them as they see fit. Three-season competitor Candice Woodcock confirmed this strange rule reality TV stars have to follow. “They pretty much choose what they want you to wear,” she told RealityBlurred. “If you don’t send them what they want, they make you go out and get it. Last night, they went out and bought a bathing suit for me after they’d already approved my other one.”

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John Cochran, a multiple-season participant who won “Survivor: Caramoan,” was identifiable by his sweater vests — an article of clothing he didn’t wear before he joined the cast/ “The lady on the phone said, ‘Justin Timberlake wears sweater vests,'” he explained at a speaking engagement (via RealityBlurred)

With the exception of the numerous all-star showdowns, every “Survivor” season features a new group of willing castaways taking their chances in the middle of nowhere to try to outlast everyone else and win a fortune. This means that over its 25-plus years on the air, the show has featured many scenes showing increasingly thirsty and worried individuals and groups trying and failing to start a fire in order to boil water so that it’s potable and free of infectious germs. That water comes from wells dug up near the contestants’ camps, and it’s at least implied that the life-sustaining liquid is very unclean before the crude purifying process.

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Actually, the water is fine. Contestants have to get what they need from the wells, but those aren’t necessarily naturally occurring. The well is pre-stocked with clean, pure, ready-to-drink water from an outside source, poured in there out of a cooler jug. Some mild annoyances like insects and dirt may find their way into the water after it’s put into the well, but it’s likely it’s safe enough to drink without all the boiling. The fire-building, in other words, is a bit of unnecessary made-for-TV stakes-raising.

Each weekly episode of “Survivor” takes up 90 minutes of real estate in CBS’s primetime schedule. Naturally and logically, it takes a lot of editing to get hours upon hours of raw footage of as many as 20 or so contestants down to a manageable length that also tells a story and advances the plot of the season. A lot of stuff that just wouldn’t be very interesting to television viewers — or which isn’t dramatic or fails to serve the action of the show — gets readily cut out before airtime. Such a truncated and compressed episode makes it seem like the day-to-day life of a “Survivor” contestant is full of high stakes and tension, as they spend all their waking hours trying to keep themselves alive by getting their basic needs met or building alliances with others to maintain their spot on the show.

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In reality, the life of a “Survivor” contestant is boring at worst, or not unlike their existence back home, generally speaking. The big centerpiece challenges are staged only two out of every three days on location, so contestants frequently get a whole day where they don’t have to do much for the cameras. The other main part of the “Survivor” experience, foraging for food, obtaining water, and building and maintaining shelter, only takes so long, so the stars get a lot of downtime to do with as they please.

Those climactic and impactful Tribal Council meetings that take up most of the final act of most episodes of “Survivor” are made to seem all the more foreboding and ritualistic by plenty of shots of contestants approaching the torch-lit meeting sites. All the competitors somberly walk to the meeting with great importance, utilizing walking sticks and carrying packs on their backs for what’s seemingly a tough journey. That’s all for the cameras, though, and those walks consist of just a relatively few steps.

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Contestants don’t get to the Tribal Council meetings by marching there — that could feasibly take hours. Like a lot of sets for major TV shows, the on-screen talent is shuttled around from place to place via small motorized vehicles. Then, until the crew is ready to film a Tribal Council sequence, those competitors wait in a nondescript holding area away from the cameras. And when the short walk finally does happen, the contestants may have to tape it more than once, until producers get a scene that’s suitably tense and serious.

After surviving the dangers of nature with only minimal skills and tools, “Survivor” contestants must then face the most brutal predator imaginable: the competition. During the episode-ending Tribal Council meetings, the weakest and most disliked contestants are carefully considered for elimination by a jury of their peers. Some of those individuals get to speak, delivering as persuasive an argument as they can as to why one exile or another ought to be knocked out of the contest as soon as possible.

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Those juror speeches can be very harsh and vitriolic, so much so that “Survivor” has to get clearance from the powers that be before they can air on television. Therefore, producers don’t leave anything to chance. While those speeches look like the result of a lot of negative emotions suddenly but surely bubbling over into a litany of accusations, insults, and slights, they’re all pre-written and then rehearsed ahead of the Tribal Council meetings. “When I had my turn to tell them my speech, they freaked out,” “Survivor: Gabon” and “Survivor: Caramoan” cast member Corinne Kaplan recalled in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” event about one of her juror speeches. Host and producer Jeff Probst gave her the go-ahead and told her to recite verbatim what she’d devised. “I had it memorized,” she said.

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Those “Survivor” Tribal Council meetings quickly became iconic in the reality TV genre. After cases are made for elimination regarding several targets deemed worthy, the rest of the contestants vote by pen and paper, and their slips are then tallied and announced by host Jeff Probst, with all of the proceedings taking place in a rustic shelter surrounded by vegetation, campfires, and other ritualistic accoutrements.

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The Tribal Council scenes move along swimmingly, which seems odd considering how much has to get done to make just that one segment of one episode of television. On screen, such a scene spans no more than about 10 to 15 minutes. In reality, the Tribal Council sequences take at least an hour to film. By that point, producers are still figuring out the storyline for that episode (if not the season on the whole), and so they have to capture a lot of footage in order to have what they need when it comes time to edit. This means Probst has to ask a lot of questions, and the majority of those, and their responses, get edited out in the end.

A series of laws enacted after a quiz show fixing scandal of the 1950s loom over today’s more gamified, prize-carrying competition-style reality shows, such as “Survivor.” They’re not conclusively binding, however, meaning that it’s at least a possibility that producers can dictate the events of the show to provide the outcome they’ve deemed the most favorable. In other words, and according to some former contestants, “Survivor” can be easily fixed, and on at least one occasion, it was.

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Stacey Stillman competed on the very first season of the reality TV show in 2000, and she was the third person voted off by her fellow contestants. Stillman filed a $5 million breach-of-contract suit against “Survivor” network CBS, as she was denied the opportunity to go for the $1 million grand prize because lead producer Mark Burnett allegedly persuaded contestants Sean Kenniff and Dirk Been to vote instead to keep 72-year-old Rudy Boesch on the show longer, as he would attracted the network’s older viewers more than the much younger Stillman would. Been testified in support of Stillman, corroborating the ousted contestant’s claim. (The parties reached a settlement outside of court.)