The show Survivor.

[Armistead]

How many Survivor fans out there. I've applied about 100 times.

My wife knows Jane fairly well since they both show dogs. She lives about 45 minutes from me. They have often competed against each other, travelled together. She's one tough bitch. Hope she wins so I can borrow some money.

She ain't near as broke as she makes out, big nice farm, her dogs worth a small fortune

[Sailor Steve]

Never watched it, even once. Real reality is bad enough. Fake reality is too much.

[Armistead]

What makes you think it's fake....I'd say Survivor is probably the first and only true reality show.

Still, the last few years you can tell they push certain people to take on rolls and ruining what the show once was. Probst has now become a baffling idiot during councils, basically letting everything out of the bag.
I'd tell him to STFU.

[Sailor Steve]

Um, they can vote each other off the Island? They have rules? They have safety-nets? They have camera crews? The last one left wins a huge prize? It's called "Survivor", but the ones who didn't "survive" get to tell everybody why?

It's just another stupid game show.

[edit] Don't take this to mean I think I'm demeaning you for liking it, or even trying to argue about it. I have lots of things I like that I wouldn't expect anyone else to. It's just my opinion, and I know how little that's worth.

[Armistead]

Oh, we all have things we hate and like. Most love or hate Survivor, but with any show like this you'll have camera and safety crews. I'm sure they're still miserable as hell.

There's another show called Survivorman where a man and his wife survive the wild...funny, the wife often fears of dying when an animal comes along and at least 10 different camera angles of it.

[Sailor Steve]

The only reality show I saw that I liked was a few years back, and it didn't last. I forget the name and the channel, but it consisted of teams made up of soldiers, cops and firemen competing against each other in hostage-rescue and infiltration scenarios. Like the others they had to get rid of a member every episode, but it was fun because they had to extract 'hostages' from convoys and buildings, with helicopters and 'enemy soldiers', with everybody firing laser rifles, and it could end up going any way imaginable.

[edit] Found it! It was called Combat Missions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Missions

[Penguin]

This is a great scene from Curb your Enthusiasm: two survivors discussing:


no snacks, no toilet paper....

[Armistead]

survivor vs the holocaust.....pretty good.

[Penguin]

pretty, pretty good - don't you think so? The real survivor brings it to the point.

Anyway, though I've seen only fragments of Survivor and think it's crap, there are two allright survival shows out there on Discovery. One is called "Man vs. Wild", where the narrator gets thrown into the wild and tries to manage it out on his own - he films himself doing this, so I presume he's really alone out there.
The other one I've seen a part of is called "Dual Survivor" where an ex-army ranger and a hippie, both survival specialists with different backgrounds and skills, make it through the wilderness together. Though they are accompanied by a camera crew, the show isn't the dumbest and quite informative.

[Armistead]

The guy you think is alone there actually isn't. He has armed guides and a safety team, but a good show.

The deal should be clear, these shows are produced by corporations or groups that must protect themselves from mass lawsuits and follow the same protection and work comp laws as normal business.

Course people that go on these shows basically sign their life rights away, but that wouldn't stop a lawyer, so they follow as many safety protocols as possible.

Not that they're not dangerous, look what happened to the Croc Man Steve.

[Sailor Steve]

I never said they weren't dangerous. 'Wrasslin' is dangerous, and the people who do it really are in fantastic shape. But it's still just a show.

I recently watched an old episode of JAG which had a subplot about a woman who was suing the navy for "rescuing" her when her homebuilt raft sank on a fictional version of Survivor. Very funny stuff.

Just FYI:
Survivorman = Les Stroud going it alone with his cameras (Safety Crew elsewhere)

Man Vs Wild = Bear Grylls and his safety crew

As for Survivor, meh it would be funner if they just threw them on an island with no intervention, voting off the Island could be killing one of the other survivors and eating them.

[August]

Originally Posted by Rilder

Just FYI:
Survivorman = Les Stroud going it alone with his cameras (Safety Crew elsewhere)

Man Vs Wild = Bear Grylls and his safety crew

As for Survivor, meh it would be funner if they just threw them on an island with no intervention, voting off the Island could be killing one of the other survivors and eating them.

Dunno about cannibalism for TV but the show Survivor would have been a lot more interesting if the teams were really teams. This business of pretending to be working as a group while secretly plotting against each other totally ruined it for me.

Totally agree with your comments about Les Stroud too. He keeps it way more real than Bear does.

[Platapus]

In our house, our record for watching Survivor was just under 10 minutes. We only lasted that long because I needed to finish up "refreshing" The Frau before changing channels.

Anyone remember the British show "Now get out of that"? That was a fun show.

[krashkart]

I wouldn't mind reality shows if there were fewer of them. When Big Brother is in season... ugh... they have to run episodes of it three or four times a week. It just gets old. But there are folks who really like watching that stuff.

Survivor definitely has backstabbing down to an art. That's really all that the show is about.

Bear Grylls - I love how he describes the taste of every bug he eats. "This one tastes like a four-day old bogey."

Les Stroud really roughs it, and I can totally appreciate that.