THE UNRELENTING JOY OF FINDING AN IMMUNITY IDOL IN A FAUX CLAMSHELL
The Weekly Recommendation: Survivor (Cook Islands)
Week 1
Required Reading: Survivor: Cook Islands AKA The One Where Contestants Are Divided Into “Tribes” By Race
(Note: Suspended in 2006 amber, this season is a brisk plunge into what not-so-distantly passed for acceptable racial discourse. NOTABLY, this psycho premise lent to featuring the most contestants of color by far of any Survivor season, and introduced series icons: Parvati Shallow, Ozzy Lusth, Cao Boi, and Yul Kwon.)
Recommended Reading: This Survivor Camera Crew AMA
Afterglow Thoughts in Excess (I will shorten these, lol.)
This winter, I entered into a binge so lengthy and all-consuming that for four months I refused to watch anything else. An episode of Bridgerton felt like eating sand. The actual viewership data between the tangle of platforms streaming Survivor was inaccessible to me, the public, but I feel like the series had a pandemic-driven renaissance. This year, Survivor, a show I had previously tagged under “Republican culture,” began appearing on my feed; embraced by unlikely stans: notably, Ziwe, Jenna Wortham, & Lucy Dacus,
Whether via chicken or egg, Survivor experienced a resurgence last October when Netflix announced that seasons 20 & 28 of would be added to its streaming collection.
So the question is: has Netflix’s licensing team been working on this deal for years? Or did analysts predict that a winter-bound audience enduring the second wave was primed to watch a reality tv bedrock where strangers alternatively spoon and wrestle each other on a beach? That horizontal urban-dwellers with belly-rested laptops would take a dab and watch a mother of three and a printer salesman race each other up a giant wooden pyramid for an immunity idol and experience unrelenting bliss?
When I watch Survivor, it feels like an egg has been cracked above my crown and its insides dribble down the sides of my brain, until the whole organ is evenly coated in hot pleasure: a metaphysical sensation of hygge. A couple years ago, I watched the first season, Survivor: Borneo, (an admittedly, slower-paced, clunkier model) with mild enjoyment before setting it down. But for reasons both glaring and indeterminable, it just hits differently this year. The loosely-defined practice of TV binging (how many episodes in a sitting constitutes a binge? is singular focus required?) stimulates the neural reward system. Dopamine is released when a reward is expected. If the reward is greater than expected: levels climb. The inverse also applies.
Descriptions of dopamine fasting, an over-reported Silicon Valley fad, read like a mean-spirited telling of my own WFH days.
“I avoid eye contact because I know it excites me. I avoid busy streets because they’re jarring,” Mr. Sinka said. As the day wore on... Mr. Sinka, now wearing a thick vest, continued to hang out at home doing basically nothing.”
This dramatic reset is, I guess, a fundamental misunderstanding of a cognitive behavioral therapy for the drug addicted. But I wonder if living a year of desaturated or sparse pleasure changes how we experience joy? Has my expectation of reward been lowered so dramatically that watching a homeless shelter manager find a hidden immunity idol in a faux-clamshell sends my dopamine levels off the chart? Or is this just well-crafted television?
Interrogating my own obsession with the longest-running reality show in history feels like a flailing attempt at separating my chaff from everyone else’s chaff. Nicholas Carr, a digital minimalist outlining the intellectual consequences of internet consumption, wrote that “in the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.” Every couple of hours, new queries are published on r/survivor like, “Robb Zbacnik from Thailand S5 has prison-like tattoos. Any feedback on if he ever served?” User:Valuable-Reflection1 and I have produced distinct thought-coils around the same source material. A source material that sets the opportunity to win a million dollars in a lush bedding of faux indigenous iconography. There is no ethical consumption under Mark Barnett Productions, but I have all these coils.