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Dylan Thuras: I want to ask you a question before we get to any of this meatier stuff. If you had to be a contestant on any reality TV show, what would it be?
Emily Nussbaum: The problem is, if you write a book about the history of reality TV, you are much less prone to want to be a contestant on any reality television show. This isn’t because I hate reality TV. The book is like, you know, talks about the ugly parts and the beautiful parts and, you know, the sort of punk, creative provocations. But I’m trying to think if there’s any show.
Dylan: You have to choose. There’s gotta be one.
Emily: Real Housewives of The New Yorker.
Dylan: This is Emily Nussbaum. Emily is the staff writer at The New Yorker. And although she may not want to star in reality TV, she has written one of the most insightful, interesting books on the subject that I’ve ever read. It’s called Cue the Sun! So would you not, you would not go on Survivor?
Emily: I would just be terrible on Survivor. I’m a weakling. They cast for resilience, and that is not my strongest quality, but I think this is probably true of many nonfiction writers. You know, there are exceptions. I would not go on Survivor, but I do think Survivor is a fascinating show. And I’ll say up front, when I wrote this book, of course I knew I was going to write about Survivor. When it came out, it blew people’s minds.
Dylan: As you know, this podcast is about place. And in Survivor, place is very important. The contestants are actually kind of competing against the place as much as they are each other. It is the island which can really get you. It’s filled with creepy crawlies, there’s no food, it feels like everything is trying to take you down. But Survivor is also a reality TV show. So while the island is a very real place, it’s also a TV set. Much of it is constructed. So there’s always this question: How much of this is real? How much of it is artificial? How much are the contestants actually trying to survive the island? Or are they just trying to survive the show’s producers? I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we are taking a trip to the island of Pulau Tiga. Emily Nussbaum takes us there, and she takes us back in time to the very first season of Survivor. It’s a story about making up an entire genre of reality TV as you go, and about the many, many mistakes you make along the way. It’s complete with styrofoam sets, producers sleeping on the beach with thousands and thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment, and of course, a grub eating contest. Turns out, grubs are kind of tasty.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Dylan: So let’s go back to the very first season of Survivor, and really, the first moments of filming Survivor, and really, some of the early parts of creating this entire genre of reality TV. The year is 2000. A TV crew and a cast of 16 people are approaching the island of Pulau Tiga. It’s off the coast of Malaysia. Pulau Tiga was created by a volcanic eruption in the late 1800s, and it was totally uninhabited. Today, most of it’s a national park.
Emily: They truly chose an island that was off the beaten track. If anybody’s watched or remembers the first episode of the show, the cast of the show, the 16 people, they’re all on this big ship, and it was literally like a four-hour trip out to the area where they’re going to get close to the island. And at that point, Jeff Probst, the host, makes this big announcement and says, okay, you have 10 minutes or whatever to grab anything you want on the ship, and then you’re divided into two tribes, and you have to get into these rafts and row out to the island. And the rowing out to the island itself took two to three hours in hugely choppy waters. People got very sick. So it was an intense experience. And I want to add, and I didn’t realize this until I was reporting the book, but the initial plan was that that wasn’t exactly what was going to happen. The producer for the show originally wanted to literally sink the ship. He wanted it to be like an actual shipwreck. That was the idea. And they tried all these different techniques to do it. It was clearly impossible to do. But this is the thing. There are very phony things that you could talk about with this show, but there was this hunger for a certain kind of authenticity. And the authenticity comes out of, and you can see this in many different ways, the pressure that was put on the people on the show, and the pressure had to do with the environment.
Dylan: Yeah, well, what’s so interesting is, especially for that first season—you know, these days, let’s say you go on a reality show and it’s got like a Survivor-ish format, you have this mental model of what you’re getting into. But on that first season, everybody, cast and crew alike, is actually putting themselves into quite a new, bizarre, and it sounds like pretty dangerous situation.
Emily: They were put on an island that was really isolated. It was very hot. It was so humid. The producers who were writing in little pads, like their notebooks, fell apart. It was rocky. Nothing grew there. There were a lot of dangerous animals on the island. It was very isolated. It was a place where pirates went. I think the Australian Special Forces were around there. I think in a certain way, they hadn’t prepared and their resources were so low that they just ended up suffering a lot while they produced the season. They were working millions of hours under terrible conditions, in incredible heat. And the cast was starving, like literally starving by the end of it. And crazily, so was the crew. Like the food situation was not good. Especially in modern reality TV, there’s a lot of contrivance. And there was contrivance on Survivor as well. One of the producers for the show told me about when they rode to the island, he was so excited. He was on the island when those rafts came in and people were getting out. They were vomiting. That was all very real. They were exhausted and overwhelmed. They were trying to figure out what they were doing. He was on the island with his crew and they were filming what was going on. And he remembers thinking to himself, this is exactly what I wanted. A lot of people who work on shows like that are very frustrated when people who view it are like, it’s all phony. It’s all made up. Some things are not in circumstances like that. That’s what the production is designed to do, produce authentic responses. So after that’s over, he calls in on his walkie-talkie to the main people. He’s like, so where do we go to sleep? There was nothing set up. They had not planned. And so they literally had to sleep on the beach with all of their cameras as, not in an exaggerated way, rats and snakes were running over their legs. And these were the conditions that continued on the island, including with all of these kind of animals that were around.
Dylan: And they’re also, of course, like on that first season, they’re inventing new challenges. You write about a famous one, and this is a little more Fear Factor than like what it goes on. But, you know, this one where they have to eat live grubs and there’s this whole story about it. Maybe you could tell that.
Emily: Yeah, one challenge is the best known one from the first season, and it was the one that became the most notorious in the press. And in a lot of ways, the show was just identified as the bug eating show, the show where they made people eat live squirming grubs. And basically, this is the way the challenge worked. There were these grubs called butods. There were these white squirming kind of caterpillar grubs with a hard black shell head, I believe, and pinchers. And the thing is, they are, in fact, a local delicacy. And as it happens, you can’t just like chow it down. You actually have to bite the head off, spit it out, and then you have to chew it really fast and gulp it down. Because if you don’t do that, the thing that has the pinchers will screw up your throat. The producer that I talked to, I think she said it was like a combination of chicken or shrimp or something. She said that she said it actually didn’t taste that bad.
Dylan: So, before we were talking about the island of Pulau Tiga, how the island itself presented challenges to the contestants, to the crew, from the climate to Australian special forces wandering around the island with machine guns. But then, of course, there were the challenges created artificially by Survivor’s producers. The most famous of these was when it came time to vote people off the island. You do not actually have to vote people off an island. That is not a normal thing you have to do. But of course, the producers did need this to happen, and they really wanted it to be a very intense experience for the contestants. So, they decided to create their own kind of island mythology.
Emily: Anybody who’s watched it is, of course, familiar with the Tribal Council. The Tribal Council was a set. It was a one-piece, enormous set that they had shipped all the way to Borneo. Like, you know, the rest of it is set on Pulau Tiga, and there were like long walks over the rocks and they would go into the water and spear the fish and all that kind of stuff. But that set was an artificial set, this kind of contrived council that is presented on the show as though it’s this real tradition that was like an ancient tradition where you like lift the torch and then the torch is snuffed out and that symbolizes life and you face your peers and all of this kind of stuff. That whole mythology was made up by the producers. But the set itself was actually a big source of struggle because the initial version of it was very, very brightly lit. And there was a huge fight where Mark Burnett had a massive showdown with the lighting guy—there was a lot of screaming fights on the set—because he wanted it to be dark and Mark wanted it to be shadowy and dimly lit because he had this frankly cult-like idea of it would sedate people into feeling like it was real and they would follow directions. Which is frankly exactly how it went down. I talked to almost all of the living cast members other than the one person, but I talked to everybody who was on that show basically. And a lot of them talked about how corny and cheesy and ridiculous that set is because it’s nuts. It’s this goofy thing with these little bridges you walk across and this phony …
Dylan: It reminds me of the old Nickelodeon show, like to survive the temple or whatever it was.
Emily: It’s totally Pirates of the Caribbean. Like it has a big treasure chest and it is very cheesy. But I will say that the low lighting ended up having an enormous impact on the show, including on the cast members who all would describe like the first time they come in, they’re kind of like, what? This is literally like this cheesy Disney World kind of thing. And they’re talking in this very solemn way. But many of them said, you know, honestly, after a little while, it just feels real. You drop your pretenses and you just feel like you’re in this incredibly solemn life and death situation. And it’s overwhelming. And that is a lot of that is about the production. But there’s also this great story where anybody who’s watched the first season might remember Gretchen who was a great cast member in that first season. And she gets eliminated halfway through the show in this very shocking elimination ceremony. And she told me the story of like, after you get kicked out of the show, you were essentially ferried out and then you slept overnight in a little cabin that was right behind where the set was. And her heart was racing. She was overwhelmed. I mean, there was very bad emotional support for people that first season because honestly, it was very traumatic being on the show. And she went for a walk on the beach. And I think she came across one of the Australian guys with a gun and she was sort of overwhelmed by this whole circumstance. She remembers she was walking back and she looks up and she sees this thing that looks like kind of a hunk of styrofoam. And you know, she was doing the entire show on the basis—as many of the people were that first season—not that it was, you know, for fun, but as like an existential test of a challenge of your survival skills. And she looked at this thing that’s like a chunk of styrofoam and she realizes it’s the back of the tribal council set. And she looks at it and she’s like, it’s a game show.
Dylan: She’s both just gone through probably one of the most intense experiences of her entire life. This very physically intense, socially very intense, you know, kind of like—and then is like, oh, this is all just for TV.
Emily: Yeah, this is a TV show. I mean, of course, they knew it was a TV show. Some of them wanted the prize money. Some of them wanted to get famous. Like it’s not like they didn’t know they were on TV, but psychologically it was like—also, the blurring between what’s real and what’s fake when you’re on any reality show, but definitely during the show, the first seasons that I talk about in this book—people are really having trouble finding their feet and they keep shifting back and forth. There was this difficulty of just maintaining your own sense of what was real and what was not real.
Dylan: Did Survivor leave any impact on any of the places where it filmed? Like is there any tourism industry to, you know, the first season island of Survivor or any of the others? Or is it sort of becomes—they engage with the place, but in this very weird kind of limited way, and then they leave and it kind of goes back to whatever it was?
Emily: Well, I talked to the local Malaysian fixer, Terrence Lim, and he was hired to oversee the Malaysian crew and to be kind of the coordinator for it. And I will say, before they came to the island, it had already been messed up by a form of tourism, which is that the beaches were covered in garbage that came from local cruise ships. There were like Barbie dolls and, you know, plastic bottles and stuff like that all tangled up. So they actually had to hire people to clean it up. And Terrence actually hired a local shaman to come and cleanse the island, and he did this whole ceremony where they actually had to cut off the head of a goat with a clean cut and then bury the goat’s head in the sand. And then they had like, they ate it, they cooked and ate the rest of the goat. And so, I’m just saying, Terrence’s perspective was not negative. And I was a little bit surprised at that because I was curious whether he felt like it had been harmful or disrespectful, exploitative, or certainly, in certain ways, the sort of made up mythology of it could be seen as offensive. His perspective fascinated me because he actually thought that the stuff they did, rather than it being, you know, like you could accuse it of being appropriative in certain ways, but because it was so made up, he actually thought that was better. He was like, if they actually took their native traditions and did sort of a Hollywood version of them, that would be offensive because he’s a spiritual guy and he cared about the idea of the spirits on the island.
Dylan: But this is like a Disneyland ride. The tiki torch, the whole thing feels like it’s closer to going to a tiki bar in some ways in that part than it is to like any real.
Emily: Yeah. I mean, this is just one person’s perspective. I mean, there have definitely been a lot of academic critiques that I’ve read of the show just for it being an expression of colonialism and the whole fantasy the show expresses. I know that there is some kind of aftermath tourism. Definitely people do want to go there for exactly these reasons. People want to fulfill the fantasy of going on a Survivor show.
Dylan: So the show filmed for something like a little under 40 days and, you know, this first season, what shape were the contestants and crew in by the end of this whole thing?
Emily: They were in bad condition. They had parasites. Like there was a lot of physical healing that they had to do in the aftermath of it. A lot of them were emotionally traumatized in the way that people often are after they go on reality shows. Theoretically there were therapists that they provided for them to talk to, but they were terrible and they did not offer real support. And they were also working for the production, which is a broader problem in reality television. Because a lot of times when people are on these shows, and again, Survivor is one of these shows, you have no one else to trust except for the people who are interviewing you, the people who are filming you, people who run the shows, who are kind of charming master puppeteers. And I think that, and this is again, not only on Survivor, one of the lasting impacts of the show is your eyes being opened the way that Gretchen’s eyes were opened when she saw the back of that set, where you realize, wait, the person I thought was acting like my friend and my therapist was trying to make television. And there’s a feeling of shock, betrayal, and recognition of the contrivances and manipulation. And that’s true despite the authenticity of your emotions and the challenges and stuff that you go through. I mean, it’s a very complicated experience. And so one of the things, and this is, you know, in the book I talk a bit about the labor issues for reality television that have haunted it from the beginning. But in the aftermath, I’ve also gotten very interested in the much more recent attempts to get some kind of protection for cast members. And I’m fully in support of that. For people who love reality television and who love shows like Survivor, you should want the people who appear on those shows to have some protections from these kinds of things that happen in the aftermath. I don’t think that’s worth making good TV.
Dylan: Totally. Emily, what a great book. I think you cover the subject with such nuance and really a sense of delight in a way. You know what I mean? Like there’s a sense of appreciating the true strangeness, the good, the bad, the ugly that is reality TV.
Emily: Well, thank you so much for having me. It was wonderful talking about this.
Dylan: You can in fact visit Pulau Tiga today. As we mentioned before, most of it is a national park now. It’s also home to a very fancy resort with natural volcanic mud baths. On the plus side, you will be able to enjoy it without being a bug under a magnifying glass. There will be no reality TV cameras there to film you while you go swimming. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the origins of reality television, and honestly, even if you hate the genre, maybe even more if you hate the genre, this is a fascinating book to read. It’s called Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum. There’s so much more about how Survivor came to be, the crazy first season, and all of these earlier stories about how the reality genre formed out of the radio era. Go give it a read.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
This episode was produced by Amanda McGowan. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manola Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holdford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.
