I haven’t seen all the series, but I’m suprised at how little stuff people have made. You’d think they’d start projects just to break the monotony. The first things I thought of too was copying the spear with local materials, and making floor mats.
By the time the game ends they should have a car that runs on coconuts.
Regarding the laziness factor: Wasn’t Sean from S1 pretty dang lazy? (Do I have the name right? The doctor, who voted people off alphbetically.)
And Susan Hawk, too. I think there have been lazy-ass slackers in every version of Survivor, and they haven’t always been black people. It’s really not fair to say all the black contestants are lazy.
**Or at least a radio. You think they could figure out a way to weave hammocks and build huts and sew tuxedos and evening gowns, too. Just in case Eva Gabor drops by, ya know. 
They had a coconut phone in season 1.
I know it’s all in the editing, but…
HOW THE HELL IS MORGAN GOING TO WIN ANYTHING NOW?
They’re exhausted. 6 days on the island and they haven’t even been able to figure out how to get a good nights sleep yet. They’re not getting any more rested as the days go on. I don’t think they they’re eating as well as Drake. They’re short two team members, and of the members they have left, one wants to leave, and another one (Lil) feels like a complete outsider. They have no team spirit, and haven’t shown any since the beginning. And they have much less than Drake, due to their completely disorganized shopping trip in the village. And now they’ve even lost their freakin’ tarp!!!
I have to admit that I like Drake a lot better, and some evil part of me grins when Morgan loses. I liked them a lot better from the moment they hit the beach in the first episode, and maybe I’m just watching this year to see how they fair. So far, pretty damn good.
My guess is that they’ll do what they did in Africa(where the same situation occured) and have some of the members switch tribes.
Chris W
Just once I wish they would allow a crappy team to get slaughtered. They made the mistakes, let them suffer. Watch get crushed goofy team swaps, or nerfing the challenges down to Survivor tic-tac-toe. Make a true Survivor game- where the weak get their ass handed to them.
Besides it would make the last 6 episodes pretty interesting when Drake finally has to compete against each other.
Won’t happen though.
I agree completely. I’m not a fan of the team swaps when its purpose is to save a team like this. I’d love (for once) to see a team just get totally cannibalized one by one till the merge.
I’d be aiming for monkey butlers first hehe.
I have to say I agree with Lib on the racism issue. In fact, I raised the same point a couple of seasons back. It’s true that there have been a number of unlikeable white players on the show, but virtually all of the black players have been portrayed in unlikeable ways, often with anti-black stereotypes.
Gervase, season 1 - portrayed as lazy.
Nick, season 2 - portrayed as lazy
Clarence, season 3 - portrayed as dishonest
Sean, season 4 - portrayed as anti-white
Osten, season 7 - portrayed as lazy
Of course all of these black men had a positive characteristic; they were good athletes.
Then consider the black women on the show: Alicia, Vecepia, Ghandia, Joanna, Tijuana. All loud and abrasive.
I’ll admit Ted from season 5 was a partial break from the pattern. But even he was shown as big and menacing - and perhaps a sexual predator.
Now Jeff Probst may have said this was a surprise to him (although what else was he going to say - “I expected it. You know what those people are like.”) He might even be telling the truth. But Probst isn’t running the show, Mark Burnett is. He chooses the players and he chooses how they will be shown when he edits the raw footage.
So either only unpleasant black people are being chosen for this show. Or ordinary black people are being made to look unpleasant thru the editing. Either way, it was Burnett’s call to make.
Shayna
Oy veh. You really shouldn’t make so many assumptions. First, just because Jeff Probst has said something over and OVER again does not make it so. Bob Eubanks said over and OVER again that nothing like up-the-butt ever aired on his show. He was wrong.
People can be mistaken without lying. Therefore, your loaded question about what makes me think Probst is a liar is unfounded, illogical, and irrelevant.
No, that isn’t the only reason. It’s merely the only reason that you could think of.
Well then, you missed Gervase Peterson. He, too, had a stellar bio blurb on CBS’s site. But Gervase was portrayed as lazy. This is not news. Even CBS.com itself admits this:
No one ever said that CBS misrepresented black men its website bios. The assertion on the table is that Survivor and other RTV shows depict black men in a negative stereotypical way. Do you understand the difference? Promotional bios (which you’re quoting) versus TV shows (which is where the problem occurs).
If I tell you, you won’t believe me obviously, so here are some other viewpoints. (Incidentally, if you’ll bother to visit the many Survivor discussion boards, you’ll see that I am far from alone in holding my opinion.)
From the NJ Star-Ledger Entertainment writer (The original SL link is dead - this is an archived quote from it):
From gossip writer Jennifer Weiner:
From Survivor Review:
From RTV critic Chris Write, writing for Poppolitics:
From Post-Gazette TV Editor, Rob Owen
(You can find hundreds of these if you Google “Survivor lazy black men”.)
Again, you’re quoting the bios, not the show.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? I’m not saying that Sean was lazy. I’m saying that THE SHOW portrayed him as lazy. Can you understand the difference?
Even the cast members themselves (except for Rob, whom you’ve villanized) portrayed Sean as lazy. From CBSNews.com:
BET.com writer James Hill laments in an article titled Why We Can’t Survive “Survivor”:
Again with the bio. Did I ever say that CBS had misrepresented black men in its bios? No. So why is that the ONLY source you rely on?
But you’re right. Ted wasn’t portrayed ON THE SHOW as lazy. He was portrayed ON THE SHOW as a rapist or molestor who felt up women and squeezed their boobs while they slept.
Which would have been the perfect opportunity to present a black man who is honorable, hard working, and of good moral character. You might not believe me, but they do exist.
Right. And if my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather. Woulda coulda shoulda.
We’re talking about PORTRAYAL here. Do you understand what that means? Do you honestly think the show portrayed him as delightfully cunning and intelligent? That’s not what I saw. I saw him being accused of being a wuss, with footage of him playing football, running and jumping, all the while complaining that his body had had it. I saw him being portrayed as a liar and quitter. There was absolutely ZERO footage to suggest that he was building some sort of master plan that involved giving people the impression that he is helpless and hopeless.
I think you’re not looking past your nose. You act like this is something you’ve never heard of and that I’m making all this up out of the blue. And it isn’t just Survivor, as I said. It’s the whole of RTV. There are a bazillion comments out there about this matter as just a few minutes on Google would demonstrate.
Here’s one example, from Ben Turner in an article titled Exploitation of Blackness:
Here’s another from the Miami Herald’s Cary Darling in an article titled Reality TV just enhances stereotypes:
I think you need to look at a few sources other than the CBS bios.
You know, after all this argument, Libertarian, (much of which I agree with), I still have to ask the question: What if Osten is being portrayed as a whiny, lazy ass because he IS a whiny, lazy ass? It’s not like he didn’t give the producers mega-footage to make that portrayal not only easy but nearly falling-off-a-log easy. How many times did he complain he was going to get pneumonia? Even stereotypes sometimes are based on truth.
Not all the lazy portrayals are of black men, either. Can anyone else say “Clay in Thailand”?
And I have to admit, of the people I dislike on the Morgan team, my deepest hatred is reserved for Andrew, the white male self-proclaimed alpha. Any 40-year-old who starts screaming at a 19-year-old kid before they’ve even gotten off the boat (according to Ryan on the Early Show), before he even knows the kid’s name, before he even knows if the kid can do anything useful for the tribe, based solely on his 90-pound-weakling image, who sets the kid up as inept when he’s clearly doing his best (in the first immunity challenge) and who sends the kid out first in the reward challenge just to humiliate his physical weakness – I’m sorry, now THAT is a despicable human. I’ll bet he’s the kind of lawyer who screams at his secretary, too. And who’s his target going to be with his favorite 90-pound-weakling gone? Lil, the older woman who was the ONLY one on his team to do well on the swimming part of the RC? Probably. Because, after all, she’s not part of the “in” crowd.
You know, I got this far and pretty much stopped reading. The moment you call someone an ass outside of the Pit (and unprovoked, no less) is the moment you’ve lost the argument, anyway.
Mama Tiger
Oh, I agree with you. That’s true. But as you can see from the documentation I provided, there’s a pattern here. Sometimes a bug is just a bug, but sometimes it’s a virus.
Shayna
I apologize. I did not mean to insult you. But I did mean to show you why dismissing my opinion with ridicule was not the wisest decision you ever made.
The fact that contestants act differently from their audition/blurb on the island is not limited to black people. What about Stephanie? Where was the girl who did a halfway naked dance on her audition tape? She huddled on the beach miserably until voted off.
It must be frustrating to the producers of Survivor as well. Why on earth would they want the type of negative publicity involved with deliberately selecting minority contestants to act in a stereotypical way?
When you read the bios for Nick and Osten and Ted, you can almost see the producers thinking, “okay, this is a serious player.” I think the producers have nearly gone out of their way to try to cast who are ambitious and hard workers in their daily lives.
Seriously, reading through the bios, watching the audition tapes, what reasons would the producers have to cast these individuals as lazy? They don’t come across that way at all. I think it’s just poor luck.
Burnett does a lot more than just watch the audition tapes and make his picks. The tapes may weed out a majority of the possible contestants, but the people who are considered as probables are carefully reviewed and questioned. That said there have been surprises; Kel from Season 2 was an example - apparently he had an explosive temper and Burnett chose him figuring he’d lose it at some point during the show. But Kel had realized this would be counter-productive and had vowed to himself to not lose control no matter how he was provoked (and those of you that saw the show, know he was extremely provoked).
But the bottom line is that regardless of pre-show intentions or on-show actions, the way people are portrayed is 90% a matter of post-show editing. There are hundreds of hours of footage taken of each player during the course of the game but only a few minutes will be shown on camera. Burnett has consistently chosen to show the least flattering and most offensive moments on all of his black contestants. And it’s happened too consistently to be written off as a coincidence. In my opinion, the only question that remains is whether Burnett is racist himself or is just pandered to what he believes is a racist segment of his audience.
On a seperate note, can someone confirm something for me? In the first episode as the Drakes were boarding the boat one of the players (Shawn?) was talking about how he had stashed forty dollars to pay for their boat. At the time, I assumed he meant he had put aside forty of the balboas they had been given. But I was talking about the show with a co-worker yesterday and he said that the guy had kept forty of his own dollars in his pocket rather than turn them in to Jeff Probst on the yacht and used this additional money to pay for the boat trip. If true, another slick move from Drake.
I remember the quote from the dude who kept his own money and I thought it was pretty clear that it was 40 USD. I agree that it was a good move. Ditto for the lady who kept her gold necklace.
On a matter far more important than possible racism - anyone else catch Skinny Ryan’s Strongbad reference with the treemail? Too bad he won’t be around anymore. Could have been entertaining.
Damn - I missed that it was noted on the 1st page.
It is a terrible thing, when I neglect my Survivor gossip!
How, then, do you explain all those post-boot interviews in which teh contestants confirm that the portraits of their fellow players correspond relatively well with the actual persons? Ryan S., for instance, has confirmed that Osten really was a big time whiner. Maybe part of that is sour grapes since he just got booted, but it’s certainly not made up out of whole cloth.
In Africa, Clarence was not shown to be lazy, but it was quite clear from his tribemates that they were pissed that he helped himself to the team’s food early in the game. And you can’t complain that that was editing–the guy really did take the extra beans and cherries.
In Marquesas, Sean was shown to be a lazy jerk. Post-boot interviews confirmed that he was a lazy jerk. For example, here’s David B’s recap of Hunter’s Early Show interview. I’d also refer you to this RNO article on Sean and race, which makes a strong argument that the guy was indeed a lazy jerk.
Editing can emphasize a contestant’s character traits, or it can hide a character trait, but it can’t show something that isn’t there.