We’ve seen a complete season of The Apprentice and eight complete seasons of Survivor. New seasons won’t be here until fall, so let’s compare and contrast strategies for each show.
They’ve got their similarities, of course – a large group of contestants is whittled down week by week – but the mechanisms are different. On Survivor, you (or your strategy) ultimately have to to impress your fellow players. On The Apprentice, you ultimately have to impress Trump and his advisors.
Perhaps the biggest strategic difference: you can get pretty far in Survivor, or even win the million, using the “under the radar” strategy. Make as few waves as possible, don’t stand out as a competitive threat, let someone else take the heat for unpleasant decisions.
On The Apprentice, on the other hand, UTR may be a valid strategy for the first couple of weeks, but it’s not going to win you the game, or even get you very close. Note Kristi and Jessie, who were both essentially fired because they were unwilling to make waves. And later in the season, Trump points out to people in the boardroom that he’s not impressed if they haven’t stepped up and seized opportunities to perform. All else being equal, he’d rather see people fail than not try in the first place.
Any other observations? (David B does a regular “what Survivors should have learned” feature at Reality News Online, which may be a good place to start on suggestions for Survivor strategy.)
(And let’s assume we’re discussing good strategy for people who want to win the game they’re playing. As Rupert and Colby demonstrate, you can end up benefitting outside the context of the show if you’re a mediocre strategic player who people happen to like.)
On The Apprentice, alliances don’t help much. You can go into the boardroom with an agreement that you’ll defend somebody or help take somebody down, but if Trump doesn’t like you, you’re gone.
The biggest difference between the two shows is that on Survivor, if you’re a threat, you have a high chance of getting voted off. On The Apprentice, if you’re a threat, Trump’s more likely to keep you around. Strategy-wise, this means that Apprentices should want to go all out, while Survivors might be better off doing a bare minimum to get by.
Personally I think the dictatorial nature of The Apprentice makes for better TV…
On Survivor, excellence is generally a great way to paint a big ol’ target on your back.
So the Apprentices strive to be better all the time and to really stick out and shine and toot their own horns.
Whereas Survivor contestants strive to not stick out or call attention to themselves, positive or negative. The ones who usually win Survivor are ones who are either virtually invisible or else just inoffensive; being either good at doing much of anything (especially winning reward/immunity challenges) or being particularly obnoxious and/or annoying (i.e. Alicia, Jonny Fairplay) are both techniques almost guaranteed to get you the boot at the first opportunity.
The only exception is the not-very-nice or downright evil person who’s good at manipulating people behind the scenes and disguising their basic evil nature. Tina and Brian are both good examples of this. We really got very little idea how detested they ended up being by their fellow contestants because their maneuvering was done so secretly. But the fact that Tina was the first All-Star boot and Brian didn’t even show up are pretty telling.
Totally off-topic: Wow, it’s nice not to be in a message-board-free workplace any more!!!
I think the tasks/challenges are more fair on Survivor. If you finish the race first, you win. Period. There’s little room for debate (except maybe in “who hits the water first” scenarios). Although the Apprentice challenges result in a financial comparison, there are a lot of additional variables at play that make the “winner” highly suspect at times. I don’t know how you’d necessarily change that, but that is one difference.
There are no designated leaders in Survivor, just unspoken ones that largely stay consistent until the teams merge or the leader’s voted off. Everyone is obliged to assume leadership in the Apprentice, and (unlike the other show), having a keen sense of self-awareness is important, as is the ability to defend your position. Tribal Council winners are largely predetermined by the time everyone assembles, but what you say (and don’t say) in the Boardroom may swing Trump in one direction or another, so it’s vital that you analyze your actions & motives and find a way to express them convincingly.
That’s a good point. I hadn’t really thought of Kwame as an UTR player, but that was part of his strategy. (I also think it’s just part of his management style.) Kwame may have been the smartest strategic player on The Apprentice, actually, especially when he took Heidi and Omarosa to the boardroom instead of Troy, who probably deserved to be there, because he knew H and O would bicker until one of them got kicked out.
Which reminds me of another contrast: on The Apprentice, it can be advantageous for you to go to the boardroom and get some practice defending yourself, as long as you’re not the one kicked out. Amy’s one boardroom performance suffered a bit because she hadn’t seen Trump in action (I doubt she would’ve been as quick to pull out her vague “I don’t remember” as an answer if she’d been there for Kristi or Jessie’s firings). Kwame and Bill, on the other hand, definitely figured out what kind of responses Trump was looking for, so they were seasoned by their exposure.
I don’t think it’s ever really advantageous to go to Tribal Council, on the other hand; at least, it never seems to work out for tribes who try to deliberately ditch someone.