Americans are going mad over a TV series called Survivor which the critics hate but is fast becoming addictive.
CBS, the network which made it, can hardly believe its success, especially among young adults whom advertisers target. In only its second episode it had higher ratings than the hugely popular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. But Survivor will eventually produce a millionaire also. The 16 original participants who have been put ashore on a remote island to live off rats and fish vote every week at a "Tribal Council" on who is to be thrown off. The last survivor will win $1 million.
The critics jeer at the series as a cross between Robinson Crusoe, the Lord of the Flies and Gilligan's Island. Tom Shales, TV critic of the Washington Post, called the show "a revolting and ridiculous bore". He foolishly predicted that "the contestants may outlast the viewers".
But in its second week, over 18 million Americans were watching what Shales called "this monstrous and ghastly mutation" and the president of CBS Television, Leslie Moonves, boasted that "it clearly has created a buzz around the country".
When I was having breakfast in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale this week, four hard-boiled executive types spent the whole time discussing Survivor and who was likely to get kicked off in the next episode.
The series is based on a successful Swedish TV show. The eight men and eight women have to survive on Pulau Tiga island off Borneo where they were landed with enough fruit for a few days.
The viewers can watch and overhear them bitch about each other as they set about making a rough shelter of logs and leaves. Food comes mainly from fish, rats and insects. Snakes are a hazard and monkeys are a nuisance when they are not being eaten.
It may be a deserted island but forget about privacy. One participant found he was being followed by a camera crew when he got up in the night to relieve himself.
The critics denounce the whole thing as voyeurism. We are all waiting to see "which young couple, overcome by the spirit of tropical romance, will head off into the jungle alone, accompanied only by their camera crew?" writes columnist John Leo.
While the idea behind the show is "to create an unscripted tropical soap opera by turning ordinary Americans in beleaguered Robinson Crusoes", writes Leo, "the only important difference is that the original Crusoe didn't have to step around a hundred people from CBS, 10 camera crews, a TV Guide reporter and tons of equipment."
In spite of the critics, people are getting hooked on watching the inter-action among these ordinary Americans struggling to stick out this weird existence for 39 days to win $1 million. CBS which taped the series last spring knows who the winner is but the rest of us have to sit though all the episodes to watch the participants voted off the island one by one. The first two to walk were among the more elderly adventurers which led to charges of ageism.
First was Sonja Christopher, a 63-year-old musician. The acerbic critic, Shales, called her "a gritty old biddy who brought along a ukelele". Rather unfairly she was voted out because she stumbled during one of the "challenges" and lost her team the race. The next to go was B. B. Andersen (64), a retired contractor, who has seen as too bossy and resented by the younger ones.
The drumming out ceremony takes place at night when Jeff Probst, the show's "irritating host" according to a critic, quenches the unlucky one's torch while declaiming "The tribe has so decided".
You feel like sniggering at the corny ritual but some critics are in high dudgeon like Frank Farley, past president of the American Psychological Association. "This is intentional public humiliation. They drum you out, blackball people. It is so destructive. After thousands of years of great ideas, of thinking we are rising from a primitive past to a higher place, then we get this. It shows the most negative side of human nature."
Get a grip, Frank. It's only TV.
Maggie Scarf, author of Intimate Worlds: How Families Thrive and Why They Fail, says that "Exiling somebody is a form of killing a person. Somebody is done a symbolic death at the end of each episode. It is like a gladiator contest, a show written by the Marquis de Sade."
Hotly tipped for martyrdom next week on the creepy island is Rudy Boesch a 72-year-old ex-navy commando who grouses about the sloppy carry-on of the young ones who could do with some military discipline.
But Rudy may yet survive longer than Dirk Breen a 23-year-old teacher who is getting on the others' nerves by reading long passages from his Bible and reminding them that he is still a virgin. He has a crush on Kelly Wigglesworth (22), a sturdy river guide. We may see romance yet.
The show is such a hit, that CBS is already planning Survivor 2 to be set in the Australian bush early next year.
Dingoes, you have been warned.