Backstabbers

Survivor: The Australian Outback goes for the throat

by Robert David Sullivan

Is there a mole on Survivor: The Australian Outback? As the obvious villain among the show's 16 contestants plopped in the middle of the Australian Outback, "aspiring actress" Jerri seems a little too good to be true. In last Thursday's episode, the first one to air opposite Friends, she did everything short of pushing someone off a cliff. She embarrassed a gourmet chef named Keith -- complaining about his sticky rice before whipping up a more crowd-pleasing tortilla -- and then argued that his lack of resentment showed how treacherous he could be. ("I see right through it. I don't think his compliments are sincere.") After that triumph, she put together a little lynch mob, saying that she saw teammate Kel chowing down on contraband beef jerky while everyone else sat around and starved. Despite a lack of evidence (a search of his belongings turned up nothing), Jerri's jerky offensive paid off, and the eight-person "Okagor tribe" voted 7-1 to give Kel the boot. Jerri is clearly not planning to win this game through athletic ability.

I doubt that Jerri was actually planted in the group by producer Mark Burnett and given instructions on how to stir things up. Like any master politician (and Survivor is a political drama more than anything else), Burnett knows enough not to leave his own fingerprints on any weapon. Besides, all he needed do was cast the right people to ensure plenty of backstabbing on this sequel to last summer's hit series. Including a professional actress (albeit one without any credits to speak of) was a master stroke. Jerri has a huge advantage over the other players in that she has no conscience. When Survivor 2 is over, she'll claim that she was merely "playing a part," and that her behavior in the Outback doesn't reflect her true personality. That's complete rubbish, of course, and the other players may have enough sense to vote her off as quickly as possible, but she's already served her purpose of goosing interest in the series. In terms of dramatic tension, the first week of Survivor 2 surpassed the fifth or sixth episode of last summer's outing.

The quicker pace was essential, since CBS has slotted Survivor 2 against NBC's highly popular sit-com Friends (Thursdays at 8 p.m.). NBC has responded by padding Friends out to 40 minutes, for at least the first month of Survivor 2. (For the first two weeks, the hour is being filled out with new material from the cast of Saturday Night Live.) CBS won the first week in the ratings, and deservedly so. NBC called its Friends episode "super size," and the comparison to McDonald's was apt. There was no more substance, just a few more fries in the box. In the same situation, Frasier or The Drew Carey Show would have tried something ambitious -- a live or improvised show, a musical or fantasy sequence, or maybe an episode done in real time. Although the cast are more polished than they were six years ago, Friends doesn't seem capable of deviating from its 30-second-scene format. In last week's episode, guest star Jason Alexander (playing a suicidal office worker) was limited to a couple of scenes with Lisa Kudrow that must have taken all of an hour to shoot. (Think of all the videotape that results in a single episode of Survivor!) And even with the extra 10 minutes, the Friends writers couldn't find anything for Matthew Perry to do in the episode.

Last week's miniature Saturday Night Live was a little better, at least proving that its "Weekend Update" fake-news segment is better than just about any sit-com in prime time. But the two other sketches -- including yet another visit with Bill Clinton (Darrell Hammond) and George W. Bush (Will Ferrell) -- were forgettable.

Given that last summer's Survivor increased in popularity each time a player was voted off the island, it looks like a rough spring for NBC. I had thought it possible that Survivor was a one-shot deal, but the sequel feels different in ways that go beyond the switch from an island to a desert setting. The editing is sharper, and Burnett wisely doesn't try to re-create the innocent feel of the first edition -- when, for at least the first few weeks, a viewer might actually believe that the physical contests were the point of the show, with the "tribal council" merely an afterthought. Survivor 2 focused immediately on the psychological warfare among the contestants. If this were a scripted show -- well, more scripted than it is -- I'd also credit Burnett with upending our expectations about the importance of alliance building in winning the game. (Last summer, Richard Hatch's gang-of-four strategy carried him all the way to the million-dollar finish.) So far, each tribe has collectively picked one member and thrown that person out in a 7-1 vote. The speed with which each tribe zeroed in on the person who didn't seem to fit in (prison guard Debb, who looked too uncomfortable during all the dirty talk at bedtime, and Kel, the army-intelligence officer who spent too much time fishing by himself) was kind of chilling. I'm tempted to say that this Survivor is a lesson on mob mentality, but the first series started out as a celebration of youth and then was hijacked by "fat naked fag" Richard, so I'm not making any assumptions about the outcome here. The only certainty is that the CBS executive who decided that Survivor was strong enough to break NBC's 16-year hold on Thursday nights has just won himself a big immunity challenge.