… I seem to know everything there is to know about it!
Look, I know that “Survivor” isn’t the first cultural phenomenon that’s been in the headlines, that’s been on all the news shows… and yet, there’s never been a show that’s been so hard to avoid!
Even at the height of Beatlemania, it was possible not to know much about the Beatles. Even during the “Who Shot JR?” frenzy, it was possible to know little or nothing about “Dallas.”
But even though I’ve NEVER seen a single episode of “Survivor,” I KNOW the names of all 16 contestants! I KNOW the names of the tribes. I KNOW all their idiosyncracies. I KNOW pretty much the exact order in which they were booted off the island. As hard as I tried to pay the show NO attention at all, just by reading newspapers and watching TV news, I learned far more about that show than I wanted to.
Is there ANY other TV show that has dominated the news this way? Any other cultural phenomenon? ANY other event that’s been THIS hard to stay oblivious to?
Well, I’ve never seen the show, and I’ve never read an article about it except for noticing a few titles. I can’t say that I’m totally ignorant about it, but I know almost nothing about the characters on it, except that after glancing at a few SDMB threads the winner’s name is Richard, or Rudy, an R name.
I’ve also heard talk of an “alliance” and “tribes” but I still haven’t quite figured out how that was woven into the rules for voting out people.
Definately Titanic. I could tell you what happens beginning to end, (never wasted my eight dollars to see it) and sing all the words of that lame-assed Celine Dion song to you (hated it!) Definately.
I never watched it. I turned off the radio at the mention of the name A.J Simpson. It was a month before I knew he got off Scott free. I never watched any of the shit from the last ten years, because I only watched tapes or now DVD’s on televison. I get overloaded by televison and papers publishing only bad stuff. They don’t spend time on local events of interest. They dig for stuff on some foreign kid that died in a traffic accident, or a murder half way around the world. The last two years I haven’t turned on the television for more than about 10 hours a month.
Addenum: I do care about people I know or local events. I just can’t handle all the bad news of the world. Conundrum: Listen to the world’s problems all day, and become numbed to the human condition, or narrow the input and remain sensitive to people around me. I choose the people around me. Sorry for the hijack, last call for Palistine.
I personally found Tiger Woods a helluva lot harder to avoid than Survivor. Harder to avoid, in fact, than Pete Sampras, Jeff Gordon, and Wayne Gretzky put together.
I have avoided Survivorquite well. I know the winner is named Rich, but only because I saw the headline in the paper. That’s the sum total of what I know about it.
(And I’ve limited my exposure to Who Wants To Be A Millionaireto 15 minutes, and that was because I was at somebody else’s house. I’m proud of both these accomplishments.)
astorian, you must not be ignoring Survivor well enough. I never saw a single episode, but I know that the winner is called Richard, and he’s gay. But that’s all. I don’t know the names of any other contestants, or the tribes, or…anything else about it. I didn’t even know there WERE tribes until yesterday when my coworker mentioned them in a discussion about the show. And I read the paper every day, and have been known to watch the news on TV. I am surprised at Survivor being on the front page of the paper, but it was much harder to avoid Titanic, IMO. I never saw that, but it was goddamn EVERYWERE. With that horrible song, too.
I’m generally not proud of ignorance, but I feel like I must take an exception. I don’t even have more important things to do, but that people could take such a strong interest in TV is kind of scary to me. They call it “reality TV” but it’s still TV! I mean, how realistic is it to put a bunch of strangers on an island and have them vote each other off? That NEVER happens to me!
I think I’ve seen three episodes and yet I can tell you what a lot of them were about because I’ve heard about them so many times from people who did watch it. Ah yes, the masturbation episode, the soup nazi episode, the everybody’s-a-jerk-so-what-else-is-new episode(s), etc.
