Jeff Probst is a being of great torment and terror in my life. I just googled “evil creature who thwarts the hero’s journey” to come up with a type of odious monster with which to compare him, this man whose ego hunts and kills the simple joy of watching people fight and eat pickled testicles, but got bored and tasted brain death. Anyway, this is new. Many of the cells in my skin and teeth and all the organs still are from before I cared about that man at all. I watched the first Survivor finale in a tiny pizza shop my uncle briefly owned and maybe laundered crimes through. None of my business but he’s dead so we can say it. Could be all made up. Don’t quote me. They had garlic knots bigger than my fist. It was summertime and I was eight. I was rooting for Kelly because she was a girl. Did I know what gay was in 2000? Richard Hatch is a can of worms which I will not pop the tab on today but I’ve recently watched Borneo again so I do know he absolutely smoked those losers despite most of them wishing to hate crime him, which he only about six percent deserved. He didn’t care and that worked well. I don’t remember neurologist cum psychological thriller author Sean Kenniff (odious creature long before this incident) saying “fag” multiple times in the final tribal with a giant grin on his face because he was repeating Richard’s joke and no one would stop him but that is what happens. Twenty years progress means that if a straight guy from Long Island said a slur giddily on network television now he would be a little canceled for a month. So ok there’s that. And I don’t really remember being eight but I always figure out which year I was at what age, and from there what year, like, Usher’s “Confessions Pt. II” came out, or my favorite dog died, using the marker that I was nine years old on 9/11. So this was a year before that. That episode and any others I happened upon during those early years of the reality TV boom made little impression on me. Twenty years and twice as many Survivor seasons would go by before I met a girl with the shiniest hair and a list in her phone of the best seasons of Survivor which she is always trying to give to people both who want it and don’t and once we were in love I let her show me a select season just to see if I’d get hives and it was so good that over the next year and a half we watched all the rest, many of which are quite bad, most of which had something anyway to offer the keen viewer, none of which is better, for me, than that first one. Today feels hard. Days go slow and they sting. If I am taking in and engaging with the world around me I feel nauseous. If I’m keeping my eyes closed I’m ashamed. But I don’t want each of these letters to be about my self-interested heaving and crying so this one is about Survivor: Micronesia.
This piece of television aired in 2008 but I still don’t want to spoil it. You ought to watch. I will spoil a little but I won’t as well. I’m a paradoxical slut that way. Micronesia is a “Fans vs. Favorites” style competition a la the classic and iconic Fresh Meat seasons of MTV’s The Challenge, which raised me. The show begins with one group of people who have been on prior seasons, and one group of totally new cast members, resulting, typically, delightfully, in a medium amount of bullying and a lot of steamrolling of the new kids in challenges. This approach doesn’t work as well anymore (though I’d still like Survivor to try another) because now reality show personalities become microcelebrities and sell things on Instagram and the disparity between these professionals and the new recruits who are desperate to become them and give up their own day jobs is stark and unsettling. The first season of The Traitors US exemplified the sweatiness inherent in such a setup, but they also just cast a lot of crybaby losers and that cannot be blamed entirely on structural problems. In 2008, having already been on Survivor mainly meant that you already knew how to weave palm fronds to make the roof of a shelter and what it feels like to tell somebody you’re not going to vote them out tonight when you know that you are. The advantages were practical and fell away fast, blending the Micronesia group until the dynamic became that of a sports team made up of cocky upperclassmen and the freshmen who become less and less awed by their superiors all the time.
A huge portion of any season of Survivor is people sitting around eating rice and picking their purple, pussy bug bites. Whether the viewer will need to open a little flashing block game on their phone to get through the lulls or if they will be riveted at all times, hanging on every word and desperate to break their own rule against doing any Survivor related Googling until after completing the season because oh my god I need to know more about these freaks, well, it’s about the people, okay? I hesitate to say that people are the most important thing broadly in the world but they are definitely the most important factor in making good reality television and this is especially true when that reality television is about sleeping outside for a month and doing puzzles. I’ve seen all forty five now so I know the success or failure of a Survivor season depends entirely on how close CBS can come to achieving the burnt sugar dreamworld alchemy of Micronesia.
The tribe of fresh new Survivors range from hopelessly vile and wretched to cherub princes and angels who have never sinned. Naturally. One prickly girl scarcely speaks in the first seventy percent of the season and then blossoms, seemingly much to her own surprise, into a starring role in the season’s three hundred cocaine seasoned Sour Punch Straws kind of climax. That’s life. But the favorites team was constructed with an elegance and wit both unlikely and spiritual!! James the Popeye-armed gravedigger of few words but also that nasty Johnny with his grating voice and hair like packaged ramen before it hits water. This, to show us the duality of man. Johnny goes home first. We have the woman who in her prior appearance on the show did justified lesbian on lesbian violence by voting out an older gay woman named Scout and terming her “true colors” to be “no part of any rainbow I’ve ever seen” which is so stupid and fantastic I think about it once a week. A girl from that same season admits that her mother worried that her daughter’s struggle on Survivor would be that even on her best behavior just her natural personality would annoy everyone and what a wise mother because it did. She’s great. This twerpy middle aged dad—who wears a fedora and is sexy to me because of the darkness of my basic nature or something that happened in my childhood—gets an infection in his knee and has to go home early but don’t worry he came back a few years after for another great season and so gave me many more opportunities to horrify my girlfriend with my desire.
I didn’t know any of these people when we watched the first time; these contestants pop on screen even to the eye of a total stranger. Maybe people are less interesting now than they used to be. It could be Obama’s fault or else something with the hormones in milk. Maybe whoever was actually a genius in casting at CBS had twins or started a natural soap company or died in a jet ski incident or moved to Wyoming. I couldn’t say. I’ll never know. I need not hypothesize about the downfall of society I am here only to bemoan that once not so long ago, really, big picture, TV shows were finding the likes of Sly Parvati who is gay and zen now and is remembered from then for her flirting and trickery but also has an eerie, under acknowledged facility for any challenge that involves staying still in a painful position for a long time. Milkfed soccer captain kinda beauty Amanda whose ass was blurred in mud stained underwear for most of her first season. Sometimes in the later episodes she wears backwards on her dirty hair a trucker hat bequeathed by a fallen tribemate and I tremble. All this and then the most. All this and then the greatest. All this and then a scholar and star like none other, the one, the only, our planet’s singular pride: Cirie Fields American Nurse.
There was a time when art meant something in this country! The second to last episode of Micronesia is the single greatest episode of Survivor. It is one of the best episodes of reality television in general. It is better than most scripted television. It is a shocking, funny, propulsive delight. I can’t be more clear. I will try. You have to watch this. It works on its own. I know; I’ve sat the uninitiated before it on our TV. These women and the power of god or a spectacular demon created something magical and it is available on Paramount Plus all the time. What happens is that four gorgeous, talented women psychologically terrorize an incredibly sweet boy to the point of such complete emotional disarray that he would act in direct opposition to his interests and he does and he is destroyed and he takes it so, so stunningly well. The girls are so happy. The onlookers are grabbing each other in shock and laughter. Really truly hootin and hollerin in the truest sense of the world all because an ice cream scooping kid with long hair allowed himself to be made a fool of and then physically ran away from our prying eyes forever. (or until he would have to appear for the final tribal council just days later.) Don’t you want to see something awesome in the true sense of the word? Have you never wanted to watch women in swimsuits and other peoples shorts use tactics of heinous mental warfare even George Bush Sr. didn’t know so as to break the spirit of a polite blond college student? Does the fearsome grace and majesty of the human woman acting boldly in her own self-interest not set a fire in your bloodstream? There is Survivor: Micronesia and there below in the cobwebbed shadows there is all else. There is my kind guidance and there is whatever sad fate you might choose. One can only lead a man to sexy maniacal babes; you can’t make him simp.
consider: plain Lacroix ** intrusive thoughts about Counting Crows “Omaha” ** doing workouts with little teeny dumbbells at the gym even if it feels embarrassing because there is only one place to start ** I’m mentioning Greta & Valdin again because I really loved it. ** Obsessed with this. Mine is navy blue. Not expensive, does what you’re buying it for, and I think I look really cute in mine and spend twice as long on my skincare routine as necessary because I’m ogling myself in this little headwrap but that’s a personal problem. ** Months ago my girlfriend made hummus and she says she kind of messed it up I guess and that the texture was off but I remember it often and as delicious. That’s life!!!!!!!!!!!!!