End of days
May 13 2004 -
11:21 p.m.
Rupert wins All-Stars Viewer's Choice
Prize;
Lex does not;
SURVIV.ORg closes (again)
A hearty congratulations to Rupert, easily one of
the finest players ever to grace Survivor, for his win on tonight's
post-game wrap-up episode. We can only think of one person who deserved it
more. 
38 million votes! Honestly, I was expecting a total
of maybe a half a million; I guess this shows that interest in Survivor
is as strong as ever. I also guess this means that Courtney and I's combined
efforts this week, hitting Lex with around a thousand votes between us (every
time I was on the phone, I was voting for Lex over and over again), didn't end
up making much of a diff. But hey, we knew that going in.
Boston Rob's placement in the Final Four was not
surprising, but seeing Colby put up was great. Give it up, though, for the best
surprise of the evening - BIG TOM! I never in a million years (or
dollars) would have guessed that Tom would have had such a fine showing in the
VC votes, but I am very glad to see it. If Lex could not have made the Final
Four, I'm pleased beyond words that Tom could.
Africa holds a special place in my heart
(although it falls behind Australia and Borneo for my favourite
season), because it was the season where SURVIV.ORg was at its full strength.
Lex, Tom, and Ethan were definitely a big part of making that year enjoyable,
so I want to give the shout out to them, one last time.
Best wishes to this year's winners, Amber and
Rupert, and all the rest of the All-Stars castaways who have made the
last few months so much fun (and/or so intensely maddening). I was happy to
come back after sitting out Survivors 4, 5, 6 and 7, to cover this very
special game, but now it's time for me to head out again.
Enjoy Survivor 1 on DVD! Enjoy Survivor
Vanuatu: Islands of Fire (best - title - ever!) in September! Pray for
Survivor 2 on DVD, and the reversal of Mark Burnett's decision to not
let Canadians play the game!
...and thanks for visiting!
- Matt
Parents just don't understand
May 12 2004 - 3:59 p.m.
Well, the many twists and surprises on Sunday night
have certainly been healthy for Survivor - the series has been getting
an enormous amount of post-game coverage this week. What troubles me is the
tone of a number of the articles. Obviously, many of the reviewers are pointing
out that the winner should have been Boston Rob instead of Amber; the trouble
is that they are almost uniformly lambasting the jury for being "crybabies,"
for not voting for Rob in spite of their personal feelings.
Listen up, kids, because I'm only going to say this
one last time:
Survivor is won in two parts. The first is
that you get yourself into the Final Two; the second is that you win the final
vote. What many of these writers seem to be missing is that whether they like
it or not, Rob failed at the second part of this equation. It does not matter
one little bit how or why a juror makes their decision - that isn't the point,
and it has nothing to do with game play. Jurors have made their decision based
on flipped coins, called numbers, and indecipherable riddles.
The onus is on the player to do what they can, both
during the game and during the Tribal Councils, to convince the juror to vote
for them in the final vote. So, to use the most obvious example, Boston Rob's
betrayal of Lex was a million-dollar mistake. Had Rob maneuvered Lex onto the
jury in any way other than an outright betrayal of a promise between friends,
Lex would have voted for his friend Rob almost without thinking, because that
is the type of person that Lex is. It falls to the player to understand the
mentalities of the various jury members, and plot their case for that final
vote accordingly. This is the sort of thing that the great Survivor
winners of the past - Rich, Brian, Sandra - have understood implicitly, and
have applied to great effect in the final Tribal Councils, answering the jury's
questions in ways that greatly improve the player's chance of securing each
juror's vote.
Rob, on the other hand, gave a truly terrible Tribal
Council performance - it is simply never effective to be as penetant,
apologetic, and contrite as Rob showed himself to be on Sunday night. The jury
never responds well to a player acknowledging his sins. However you got to the
Final Two, defend it - this is the strategy that has proven successful time and
again on Survivor.
So no. I'm sorry, but Rob did not deserve to win. As
fucking outstanding as he was at winning challenges and eliminating opponents,
he played his entire game with a serious flaw in his strategy, and paid for it
in the end. (Not that it matters, Mr. Brkich.)
There. Rant ended.
The finale of All-Stars brought in 24 million
viewers on Sunday night; this is up from the weekly average from the show, but
down from finales past. We'll see how "America's Tribal Council" (as tomorrow's
show is being rather ridiculously publicized) goes. Voting for the Viewer's
Choice awards closes tonight, so
vote for Lex as many times as you can between now and
then!
No really, vote for Lex
May
10 2004 - 10:15 a.m.
The "pleas" from the castaways for the million
dollar Viewer's Choice award have been posted on the vote page - they're to the
right of the castaway poll. You will need to get through some ads to get there,
but the three videos are fun to watch and you'll get to see stuff like:
- Amber having no good answer as to why she
deserves a second million
- Alicia saying that honesty is best
- Colby's humble pie
- Ethan's plan to split the million among the
favourite charities of the other 17 Survivors
- Jenna Lewis whining about her damned foot but
saying that Rupert deserves it more than her
- Jenna Morasca promising to give the money to
breast cancer research
- Kathy looking like a million bucks
- Richard giving props to all of the other
castaways
- Rob Cesternino giving half the money to
Rupert
- Rob Mariano whining about the jury's
decision
- Jerri refusing to participate
- Rudy promising to give it to his kids
- Rupert being Rupert, heartfelt to the core
- Shii Ann making no case whatsoever
- Sue cursing your lives
- Tina abdicating the throne
- Tom doing the numbers
- and Lex asking you to vote with your hearts.
Need even more good reasons to vote for Lex?
Read all
about his son's autism, his other son's kidney troubles, and his wife's
perspective on it, right here.
So there.
Click here to vote for Lex and watch the vids.
Vote for Lex!
May 10 2004 -
9:35 a.m.
The voting for the Viewer's Choice million-dollar
prize is open at CBS.com.
Click here to vote for Lex. You will also be asked to
select a Best Fight, Best Villain, Sexiest Guy, and Hottest Woman, and then for
the "best Survivor moment." For my money, that's Lex vs. Boston Rob,
Richard and/or Jerri (I won't vote for Johnny Fairplay because I just don't
ever want to have to see him again), Colby, Elisabeth, and Mike's face-first
fireplant.
Voting is open until Wednesday. I haven't been able
to find the personal pleas from the castaways that Jeff referenced last night,
but they're probably still in-progress.
Vote for Lex!
Love & War
May 9 2004 -
11:59 p.m.
Amber wins All-Stars;
Second
million-dollar prize to be awarded
Well, I don't even know where to start. Amber Brkich
is indeed the winner of Survivor: All-Stars... but the game ain't
over yet. Insert jaw-drop here.
I should begin with the fact that I expected this to
be my final post for this web site, and now, of course, it is not. The "Meet
the All-Stars" special airing this Thursday night has gone from being a
dismissible clip show to being one of the most unique events in Survivor
history - the awarding of a second, fan-chosen, million-dollar prize.
So it ain't over yet.
Obviously I'm going to vote for Lex to win, and I'd
hope that you're all going to do the same. Still, being a gambling man, I'd
expect that the race is largely between Rupert and Boston Rob at this point -
they seemed to have the most vocal support at Madison Square Gardens tonight,
and they have been supremely popular players throughout All-Stars. We'll
see what all 18 castaways have to say in their video speeches tomorrow. My vote
is already decided.
Man, my Survivor fixation has been a long and
twisted road. That was the first thing out of my mouth after Amber accepted
Rob's marriage proposal on live television. I'll consider the ramifications of
all of this a little more closely in my review of the
Survivor: All-Stars grand finale. Click here and check it out...
...and check back tomorrow for news regarding the
vote, Thursday night's show, and this wild, crazy, unpredictable course of
Survivor.
Waxing and waning
May 7 2004
- 10:41 a.m.
My review of last night's
irritation festival has been posted. And remember everyone, the last
episode of All-Stars is in just three days: Sunday night, starting at
8:00.
For the record, I continue to call Amber the winner,
as I did before the game even started. Rob will runner-up, and I suspect Jenna
will be third and Rupert will be a very, very pissed-off fourth.
Our man Big Tom - who I will continue to love in
spite of his absolutely shoddy performance in All-Stars - has his
post-game interview right here.
Other wacky news: you'll be seeing a different Sue
at the reunion on Sunday night, because Extra has given her a "million-dollar
makeover."
Read all about it right here.
Meanwhile, Ghen Maynard, the CBS executive who
brought Survivor, Big Brother and The Amazing Race to the
network, has jumped ship for NBC. With The Apprentice doing well for the
Peacock network, we can probably expect the next bumper crop of top-line
reality TV to come out of their stable.
And
SurvivorFever has posted highlights from a good interview with
Jeff Probst, where he talks about the finale, the All-Stars
gameplay, and whether he thinks another All-Stars game is a good
idea.
Survivor: the complete first season on
DVD
May 4 2004 -10:53 a.m.
This is far and away one of the most unusual
packages yet to be offered on DVD. CBS has, for all intents and purposes,
packaged a game show (with an eventual winner so universally known as to remove
any possibility of surprise for an unfamiliar viewer) as a complete season
boxed set, as though it were C.S.I. or Star Trek: The Next
Generation.
Of course, Mark Burnett would remind us that
Survivor is not a game show, but rather an "unscripted drama." And that
is why I am particularly glad to have this box on my shelf. No matter how lame
the latter incarnations of the game may have become, Survivor 1 was
brilliantly dramatic. In fact, I'd forgotten how great this season really is.
As simplistic and wobbly as this original draft of what would become
television's most successful reality series might be, it stands head and
shoulders above its offspring for sheer enthusiasm and entertaining
storytelling. It was fresh and immediate in ways that the show hasn't been able
to be since.
Okay, the deets: Survivor: Borneo is
presented as a complete series boxed set in four thin clamshells, along with
the pre-packaged "Greatest and Most Outrageous Moments" DVD thrown in as a
bonus. (As I mention below, feel free to sell this thing off if you already
have it; it comes shrinkwrapped and sealed, and was probably lifted straight
out of a warehouse of unsold stock.) The set presents the 13 original episodes
of Survivor 1, along with the post-game wrap-up hosted by Bryant Gumbel.
All episodes are, of course, television standard 4x3. They look great. There's
a bit of chunkiness in some sequences, but this is probably due to poor source
material rather than poor DVD encoding. At four episodes per disk (and each one
originated and mastered on video), bitrate is exactly what you expect it to be.
The series looks awesome.
And, good news for pathetic sticklers like me: it's
exactly as aired, including even the "previously on's" and the "next time on's"
as they appeared on the show. The original version of the opening credits
sequence is included in the first few episodes, which includes that infamous
two-frame cut of the Final Six making their way to Tribal Council, before Mark
Burnett discovered that zealous fans were freeze-framing their tapes of the
show in an attempt to determine the winner. This entire box appears to be a
straight lift of the master tapes of the original aired episodes (not the
revised rerun versions which aired in August of 2000). The censorship of
swearing and Richard's naked ass, removed for the "Greatest Moments" disk,
remains in place on the episodes themselves. Again, for pathetic sticklers like
me, this is exactly what we want: no tampering, no George Lucasing, no special
editions. Survivor 1, in all its original glory.
The only oddnesses: There are no scene access menus
(although there are chapter stops in the episodes themselves), making it
difficult to jump directly to one of your favourite moments. And the fades to
black for commercials seem a bit short, as though the company was attempting to
create seamless cuts from one act to the next. It doesn't really work. Other
than these small quibbles, however, I am hard-pressed to find a single thing
wrong with this set. I've watched the first two episodes and skimmed my
favourite moments from several others, and find everything to be exactly as I
wanted it.
The biggest surprise about this set (besides the
fact of its existence) is that the producers have actually recorded commentary
tracks for both the first and last episodes of the show. The commentaries
feature Big Testicle Man Jeff Probst, along with winner Richard Hatch, and
not-so-winners Gervase Peterson and Rudy Boesch. Jeff and Rich are wonderful,
both of them incredibly enthusiastic and nostalgic about making the first
Survivor. Gervase plays it cool, and Rudy (rather predictably) sometimes
has to be prompted into speaking at all. It's a fun commentary, and any fan of
the show will love it: it's like watching the show with four of its most
memorable personalities in your living room.
The best thing about Survivor 1 is that it
takes place in that halcyon time when the castaways were actually deluded
enough to believe that the game was a meritocracy, and that the winner would
eventually be revealed as the person who had been most capable of withstanding
the rigors of life on a deserted island. If that had been the case, of course,
the game would have been called Survivalist and Gretchen would have won.
This alone makes a revisit to the series, via the DVD, worth the price of
admission: through no fault of its own, no matter how many incarnations
followed, Survivor could never quite manage to tell this story again,
because the jig was up the minute Borneo hit the airwaves. Just like
remembering your first love, there's a lot to be said for the innocence of days
gone by.
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