--- ---  # How _Survivor_, at 15, Still Sets the Pace for Reality TV  by [Daniel D'Addario](https://time.com/author/daniel-daddario/)  ## Daniel D'Addario May 29, 2015 11:00 AM UTC  The June 26, 2000, cover of TIME The June 26, 2000, cover of TIMECover Credit: GREGORY HEISLER  by [Daniel D'Addario](https://time.com/author/daniel-daddario/)  ## Daniel D'Addario May 29, 2015 11:00 AM UTC Earlier this month, when presenting the upcoming fall TV schedule, a CBS executive described _Survivor_, which will begin its 31st cycle of episodes in the fall, as “the miracle show, the marathon show.” The series has found a core group of fans who keep its ratings unspectacular but very reliable. While brighter-burning stars get critical attention and social-media love, _Survivor_, with its two installments a year, chugs along, largely sticking to its formula: Every week, someone is eliminated from the physical and mental competition, until there’s no one left to vote out and a winner is declared. This is not what one might have predicted when _Survivor_ premiered 15 years ago, on May 31, 2000\. The show’s first season, which aired that summer, was an out-of-the-box sensation the likes of which are almost never seen today; by the time the final episode aired, it was one of TV’s most consequential hits, with some 52 million people watching Richard Hatch take home the $1 million prize. By contrast, the season finale of _Empire_, considered TV’s biggest new hit in years, had 16.7 million total viewers; the Academy Awards (traditionally the highest-rated entertainment broadcast of the year) got 36.6 million viewers this year. Though it was not the first reality show on television (MTV’s _The Real World_, for instance, predated it by some eight years), it brought a sense of danger and intrigue to the genre. Describing the appeal of the show, my colleague James Poniewozik, author of TIME’s June 2000 cover story about the phenomenon, wrote that the show’s appeal lay in the “Machiavellian twist” of the voting-off structure, and thus in “the suffering, the mean-spiritedness, the humiliation.” The sense that _Survivor_ was unusually mean-spirited and harsh has died down in recent years, not least because of the show’s twice-a-year repetition wearing down any opposition. Indeed, _Survivor_, having largely stayed the same as TV changed around it, is now truly family-friendly viewing, a slightly edgier _Jeopardy!_ compared to the shows it helped to spawn. (Common Sense Media, an advisory group for parents, [says](https://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/survivor) it’s appropriate for 11-year-olds and up.) If anything, _Survivor_ seems tamer than ever, as viewers learned after a [burn incident in season 2](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/accident-in-the-outback/) that doctors are standing by to swiftly deal with any true medical emergencies and as the privation of life on the island has grown less extreme. (No one, lately, has been [eating rats](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1332050/TV-survivor-banished-for-refusing-to-eat-a-rat.html).) _Survivor_, unlike the cable mainstay _The Real World_, was a network-TV hit that could be replicated. (The 1970s’ _An American Family_ was a zeitgeist hit, but its premise was all about exposing fissures, with zero upside for the participants. Who’d sign up for a season 2?) The show proved that a very cheaply produced series with the right concept can be huge, a lesson that’s been put into practice by producers of everything from _Teen Mom_ to _The Real Housewives of New Jersey_. These shows (along with much else in the reality genre) took from _Survivor_ that the incendiary or shocking could do well; they pushed the envelope further than _Survivor_, bound by format and by keeping its contestants physically safe, ever could. Within the genre it helped create, _Survivor,_ with its semiannual payouts to contestants who are framed by editing to look like strategic dynamos, is feel-good TV, but things are a lot meaner out there now. _Survivor_ contestants are people backstabbing one another because that’s the point of the game—and, as time has gone by, the contestants have by and large grown more conditioned to the game, and treat it less personally. There are exceptions, like a recent incident in which one contestant viciously mocked another for being single, but generally the disputes on contemporary _Survivor_ have a businesslike air. And whatever personal revelations happen on the show, now, feel old-hat; _Survivor_ changed the goalposts on what’s okay to say or do on TV to a degree that new incidents of nudity, betrayal or bickering have lost their power to shock. The proof of the power of early _Survivor_ in quickly changing the culture is that late _Survivor_ seems, now, old-hat. And its followers in the reality genre, too, are less shocking than pleasantly predictable. Real Housewives are ribald and backstabbing, too, but that’s occluded through that franchise’s general air of pointlessness; they’ve learned all the lessons of _Survivor_ but applied them to a game (of getting airtime, fans and potential endorsement deals) that never really ends. “More abstract and worrisome is the overall message the shows send: that life is an elimination contest, that difference means discord,” Poniewozik wrote in 2000\. This message seems to have been sent loud and clear by _Survivor_; all of the candid reality shows in its wake treat the comings and goings of life like a game. No wonder _Survivor_ seems nice by comparison. The wins, there, are about merit. At the time _Survivor_ first came on, its future and that of its genre’s were uncertain. It seemed just as likely that what Poniewozik called “VTV” or “voyeur television” would produce a consistent stream of world-beating hits as it did that, per TIME in 2000, “viewers may reject VTV altogether before long.” Neither prediction came true; reality television and _Survivor_ both simply chug along. _Big Brother_, _Fear Factor_, _The Amazing Race_ and a suite of cable series dedicated to probing the inner(-ish) lives of subcultures from pampered wives to Jersey Shore denizens, all became, over time, like wallpaper, no longer exceptional merely for existing. The only other major reality hits have been in the musical-competition variety, one that owes more to classic game shows than to any _Survivor_ innovation other than low cost (although, with _American Idol_‘s early judge Simon Cowell, the genre tried to tap into a vein of venal nastiness that was pretty _Survivor_esque). Even shows that aren’t megahits can provide enough cash to justify their existence (with the exception of _Idol_, which pays its celebrity judges big money and whose sagging ratings forced the show’s recent cancellation). By the standards of cable TV, _The Real Housewives_ is, in its own way, as much a “miracle show” as _Survivor_, endlessly reiterating old feuds year after year, feuds that are meaner and darker than any vote-off that’s happened on CBS. Reality TV is, today, modeled after _Survivor_ in one key regard; it all (with the exception of _The Voice_, still a hit) rates perfectly okay. This is the real miracle of _Survivor_: It just keeps going—and, so far at least, where it goes an entire genre follows. ### LIFE Watches TV: Classic Photos of People and Their Television Sets  Radio Corporation of America (RCA) executives watch a brand new invention called television, their New York offices before introducing the product to the public, 1939. Carl Mydans—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Writer Russell Finch enjoys a smoke, a bath and a TV show in 1948 George Skadding—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Men gather to watch TV through a store window in Pennsylvania in 1948. Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  A boy watches TV in an appliance store window in 1948. Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Sisters at St. Vincent's Hospital in Erie, Penn., watch a program on a new local TV station, 1949. Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Watching a Western on TV in 1950. Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  A group of swimmers at an indoor pool watch the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Jacob Malik, filibustering in the UN Security Council in 1950. George Skadding—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Grade school kids in Minneapolis watch a video "classroom lesson" on TV while the city's public schools are on strike in 1951. Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  A rapt audience in a Chicago bar watches the 1952 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. (The Yankees won.) Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Six-year-old girls use a "Winky Dink" drawing kit on their home TV screen as they watch the kids' program, 1953\. The show, which aired for four years in the 1950s, has been cited as "the first interactive TV show," especially in light of its "magic drawing screen" — a piece of plastic that stuck to the TV screen, and on which kids (and, no doubt, some adults) would trace the action on the screen. Walter Sanders—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  A performing chimpanzee named Zippy watches TV in 1955. Michael Rougier—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  An adopted Korean war orphan, Kang Koo Ri, watches television in his new home in Los Angeles in 1956. Allan Grant—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Milwaukee fans watch the 1957 World Series, when their Braves beat the Yankees in seven, behind three complete-game victories by the gutsy Lew Burdette. Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  A railroad worker's family watches TV in a trailer at a camp for Southern Pacific employees in Utah in 1957. Frank Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  An awe-struck baseball fan is seized with utter delight as he watches the Braves win their first and only World Series while based in Milwaukee in 1957. Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  A traveling businessman watches TV in a hotel room in 1958. Nat Farbman—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Tenant farmer Thomas B. Knox and his family watch Ed Sullivan and ventriloquist Rickie Layne on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958. Ed Clark—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Picketing workers watch TV in a tent outside the gates of a U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, during a strike in 1959. Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, watch the 1960 GOP convention in Chicago from their hotel suite. Hank Walker—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  The Kim Sisters — a Korean-born singing trio who had some success in the U.S. in the 1960s — watch television in Chicago in 1960. Robert W. Kelley—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Eventual VP candidate Lyndon Johnson watches TV during the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Thomas D. McAvoy—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  A "Three-Eyed TV Monster" created by Ulises Sanabria which permits simultaneous two- and three-screen viewing, 1961. Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Astronaut Scott Carpenter's wife, Rene, and son, Marc, watch his 1962 orbital flight on TV. Carpenter's was NASA's second manned orbital flight, after John Glenn's, and lasted nearly five hours. Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Die-hard New York Giants fans watch the 1962 NFL championship game against the Packers outside a Connecticut motel, beyond the range of the NYC-area TV blackout, December 1962\. Green Bay won, 16-7. John Loengard—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  A crowd watches John F. Kennedy address the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. Ralph Crane—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Frank Sinatra watches his son, Frank Jr., 21, emcee a TV show, 1964. John Dominis—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Different CATV (Community Antenna Television) stations available to subscribers in Elmira, New York, in 1966. Arthur Schatz —The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Actress Diahann Carroll and journalist David Frost watch themselves on separate talk shows. Carroll and Frost were engaged for a while, but never married. Bill Ray—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Survivor at 15: The Real Miracle of Reality Television ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3889836/survivor-history/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3889836/survivor-history/"},"headline":"How Survivor, at 15, Still Sets the Pace for Reality TV","datePublished":"2015-05-29T11:00:51.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:03:24.713Z","description":"The show premiered on May 31, 2000","url":"https://time.com/3889836/survivor-history/","keywords":["Television","TV","Survivor"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt19b512ca7ab19d2f/698851738e06012698460a4d/1101000626_400.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Daniel D'Addario","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/daniel-daddario/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt19b512ca7ab19d2f/698851738e06012698460a4d/1101000626_400.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"June 26, 2000","caption":"June 26, 2000","creditText":"Cover Credit: GREGORY HEISLER","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3889836/survivor-history/","name":"How Survivor, at 15, Still Sets the Pace for Reality TV"}}]}] ```