Survivor Shows Its Colors

To start off, I would like to apologize on behalf of my race for stealing the chicken. On the first edition of Survivor: Apartheid Island, the only sign of interracial conflict was a minor one, but it reflected poorly on the white man. Jonathan, one of the members of the Caucasian--and when's the last time you've heard that word on TV?--tribe on the ethnically split Cook Islands edition, swiped a chicken intended as provisions for the Asian team. The whole imperial-conquest thing dies hard. We're working on it.

In the end, the first installment of Mark Burnett's Great Social Ratings Stunt looked like not the ugly race war many commentators feared but a minor success. A gimmicky, hard-to-take-too-seriously success, true (even the contestants interviewed about the setup during the show seemed faintly embarrassed about it), but a success nonetheless. Not because of anything it told us about whites, blacks, Hispanics or Asians as a people at large. (That's why the hand-wringing over the show was so pointless; anyone who would draw conclusions about a race based on the performance of five people on a reality show was not too enlightened to begin with.) But rather, for the bits and pieces that it showed us about the interactions within races.

Interaction within races--Hispanics relating to Hispanics as Hispanics, and so on--is something we rarely see on TV. A typical primetime TV show is a vanilla cookie with chips of brown or black or yellow. Most often, race is never discussed: the well-integrated Grey's Anatomy, for instance, is essentially color-blind. When race does come up, the question is how members of minority races relate to the vanilla. The rare exceptions--shows that showcase diversity and divisions within a race--are African American-cast sitcoms like Girlfriends, which don't have nearly the reach of Survivor.

I don't know where else on TV, for instance, you'd see someone like Vietnamese American Cao Boi, who talked about feeling like an outcast among other Asians because of his eccentric hippiness--where else on TV would you have a quorum of Asian Americans to make that possible? That's something that would not have been possible if you had cast five Asian Americans but divided them among teams. Nor would you have seen the different dynamics that emerged within the teams--for instance, how the African American tribe was the only one that talked about feeling obligated to pull together to prove something on behalf of their group. (As one said: "We don't just run track.")

As it turned out, their tribe was first to lose a challenge, and, of course, that doesn't prove anything about any black people other than those five. But so far what matters on this Survivor is not who wins and loses but how they get there. And that how could make for a colorful show.