Review: Survivor, "I'm Not Batman, I'm The Canadian" | Season 45, Episode 6
With glowing hearts / we merge the tribes / at least eventually
When I first started teaching my Reality TV class, and we centered a week around discussion of Survivor, and after our discussion with former contestant Max Dawson my students would always ask me: “You’re a professor too, why don’t you go on Survivor?”
There’s lots of reasons why I’m in no rush to play this game, but for a long time my excuse was that I technically wasn’t allowed to. Although reality competition series like Survivor and The Amazing Race have long been huge hits in Canada, it was in spite of the fact that unlike the generation of superfans the show has been casting of late, we were never able to dream about being castaways ourselves. But that changed in 2018, and since then we’ve seen back-to-back Canadian winners (Erika and Maryanne), and numerous other Canadian contestants.
What’s been interesting for me is whether or not Survivor chooses to make their Canadianness part of their stories. The show has never really had any reason to focus on national identity, but the Ne…