Real-life Survivor

Some game shows I'd really like to see

by Kris Frieswick

So the big TV trend this season is "reality." Shows such as The 1900 House and Survivor are supposed to tap into our voyeuristic desire to see how people just like us would respond under extraordinary conditions.

I'm not buying the logic. First of all, these Survivor people are definitely not just like us. They went through months of grueling auditions in order to win the right to be stranded on a tropical island with a bunch of people they've never met, without food, where they promptly resort to eating rats. They are obviously a very special breed of individual, one that perhaps deserves to be stranded on a tropical island and made to eat rats.

And second, the producers of Survivor are missing the boat (pardon the pun) with their scenario. If they wanted to make the show truly captivating, they would create "adventures" to which the common man could relate, and from which that common man might learn a thing or two. Why spend all that money creating these elaborate, utterly fabricated, sterilized, made-for-TV adventures when there are so many real live dangerous, exciting adventures waiting just on the other side of the living-room picture window? Here are a few episodes of Survivor that might breathe new life into an already clichéd TV genre.

* Family Holiday Survivor: eight contestants are sent off to travel stand-by on a major airline during Thanksgiving weekend. Once at their destination, a double-wide trailer with polyester curtains and a redwood deck, they will be greeted by their "family," a kooky,
dysfunctional group of 15, including inbred cousins, feuding in-laws, senile octogenarians, and Uncle Frank, who likes to grope himself publicly. Each day of the week-long "holiday," the family will vote out one contestant based on the results of a variety of "challenges," including listening to Grandma tell the same story seven times in a row, breaking up knife fights between the sisters-in-law, and successfully resisting Uncle Frank's
"pull my finger" trick. Losers hitchhike home. The winner gets a year's worth of
inpatient psychotherapy.

* Big Dig Survivor: a group of eight contestants, with nothing but a Dixie cup full of quarters, $100 in bills, and a 1987 Chevy Astro mini-van, must navigate from Lower Roxbury to the North End. There they must find on-street parking, eat at Bricco without reservations, then travel to the FleetCenter on game night and again find on-street parking, relying only on existing signage provided by those puckish folks at the Mass Highway Department. On each day of this six-day adventure, contestants vote to expel one member of the group from the van based on a series of challenges, including navigational skills (also known in Boston as "dead reckoning"), tossing quarters into Mass Pike toll booths at 30 mph after being detoured, willingness to lie down in a parking space to save it, and aggressiveness in dealing with North End locals. Losers left wandering aimlessly in Boston. Winner keeps quarters and automatically becomes a contestant in Tow Lot Survivor.

* Assembly Line Survivor: for four weeks, eight contestants work the night-shift assembly line at the Honeypie Plastics factory in Wilmington. Fellow assembly-line workers "freeze out" one contestant each week based on a series of challenges, including maintaining consciousness while engaging in short-range repetitive motion for eight consecutive hours with only two 15-minute breaks, maintaining a normal relationship with family while sleeping, and scoring whites for other line workers (hope you brought enough of those for everyone!). Losers are fired and have their wages garnished for every trip to the toilet during employment. Winner receives minimum wage, two weeks of vacation, all the coffee he or she can drink, and a year's supply of melatonin.

* Bridesmaid Survivor: eight women become bridesmaids to a nervous bride whose wedding is just six short months away ("We've got a lot of work to do, girls!"). Every three weeks one bridesmaid is uninvited based on a series of challenges, including willingness to sit through four-hour discussion on reception color scheme; ability to retain dignity while wearing lime-green, off-the-shoulder, Scarlett O'Hara-style bridesmaid's dress (with matching parasol); creativity in planning bachelorette party that is equally acceptable to bride's mother and bride's worn-out ho-bag friends from college; and amount of money spent on shower/wedding presents. Losers miss "wedding of the century" and forfeit all money spent. Winner is named maid of honor and gets to sleep with hunky best man in coatroom during reception.

* Dot-com Start-up Survivor: armed with ridiculous sums of venture-capital money, eight contestants create a wacky loss-based dot-com business plan, staff up with exorbitantly priced technical and marketing employees, find overpriced office space, and attempt to generate revenue. Each month a new contestant is expelled from the firm by the VC investors based on a series of challenges, including degree of believability when begging for bridge funding, willingness to work 30 consecutive 19-hour days, creativity in revenue-recognition practices, and ability to generate knee-deep bullshit when dealing with analysts. Losers sacrifice unvested options (although they are not automatically disqualified from upcoming seasons of Dot-com Start-up Survivor). Winner receives incalculable (paper) riches, his or her photo on the cover of the Industry Standard, and tons of babes (of either sex).

* HMO Survivor: eight genuinely ill contestants are sent to the emergency room of a downtown hospital without their insurance cards or pre-authorization by preferred-provider physicians. Emergency-room physicians decide whom they will treat based on a series of challenges to patients, including ability to wait for up to 12 hours for medical attention; willingness to deal with surly, overworked nurse at reception desk who is less concerned with a carotid-artery hemorrhage than with determining your method of payment; ability to communicate symptoms while suffering from excruciating pain; and willingness to engage other HMO Survivor participants in gallows humor while waiting for help. Winner treated and released without being required to make full up-front cash payment. Losers die.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.

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