Review: Survivor, "Good and Guilty" | Season 41, Episode 2
New editing strategies shape our reactions, while new reactions to twists change their shape
This week, I showed my Reality TV students the pilot to MTV’s Stranded with a Million Dollars, a short-lived millennial reality competition series, and we broke down the way it uses different stylistic elements to introduce its cast and their stories. It was an exercise that reinforced my interest in how Survivor’s editors are deploying the increased focus on personal backstories, with the use of personal photos to transform stories that might otherwise be told purely through voiceover or conversation into a more audience-focused narrative.
I’m told these are a transfer from Australian Survivor (I never got to the seasons before Paramount+ pulled them), and they’re obviously nothing new for Reality TV.1 But they’re new for Survivor, and they have an impact on how we understand the early edits we so often use to handicap the producers’ understanding of the players and their place in the game. Last season, several contestants didn’t get their own “photo montage package” until extremely late in the game, while others received them early on. If we presume that the producers have put together a potential package for each of them in the abstract, is their deployment a sign that player isn’t long for this world? It’s a new piece of the puzzle, and one that we don’t have a clear handle on yet.