‘Everything on That Island Wanted to Kill You’

When the first season of Survivor began filming in the spring of 2000, nobody knew this was going to be the show that changed television forever. Well, Mark Burnett probably knew — the executive producer who sold the Survivor concept to CBS was never short on self-confidence. But the producers and contestants in the air above Borneo on that first day of filming had no idea what this series would become. The contestants didn’t even understand what kind of TV they’d be making — some envisioned a wilderness documentary, others had prepared for an endurance adventure, a few thought they’d be making a docu-soap.

If the shape of the show they were about to make was uncertain, the stakes of this ambitious experiment certainly weren’t. Burnett may have convinced CBS to give Survivor a green light only a few months before, but the show he was about to start filming had roots in TV as far back as 1988 and the work of a British TV producer named Charlie Parsons. This was the product of several TV visionaries across multiple countries, who had evolved their pitches into a combination of Burnett’s Eco-Challenge and The Swiss Family Robinson, and it had to work.

In Emily Nussbaum’s new book Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic digs into the roots of the genre that indeed changed television forever. In this excerpt on the birth of Survivor, Nussbaum goes back to the moments before the 16 original castaways were marooned off the sides of a ship in the South China Sea, left to swim for a beach where their game — and the production of the show — had already begun. It was a competition and a network gamble that many in front of and behind the camera were not prepared for, and for which they would all have to make up the rules as they went along.

Survivor began filming on March 13, 2000. The 16 castaways, who knew very little about the format they’d signed up for, based their expectations on previous reality shows. Gretchen Cordy, a former Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape trainer for the Air Force, imagined a gritty adventure-sports series, something like Mark Burnett’s previous TV show Eco-Challenge. College student Colleen Haskell thought of MTV’s The Real World. Several players harbored Hollywood dreams; they all wanted the prize money. But a significant proportion of the group had applied primarily as an existential adventure, like skydiving or a silent Buddhist retreat. This peculiar new type of television show would be a test of their strength, a way of exploring who they were and what, exactly, they were capable of.

Under strict orders not to interact with one another, the cast flew to Borneo. For two days, they stayed at the Magellan hotel in Kota Kinabalu, eating heartily, getting schooled on survival skills, and learning the rules (no hitting, no splitting the money). Each of them was cleared for one “luxury” item, like tweezers (the truckdriver Sue Hawk) or the Bible (the evangelical Dirk Been). Finally, they boarded a schooner to the island, Pulau Tiga, a four-hour ride. Only then were the rules against fraternization finally lifted. Gervase Peterson gave Ramona Gray, the only other Black contestant, a nod. Sue spoke with Gretchen, her fellow practical tomboy. Gretchen also walked over to Richard Hatch, a corporate consultant from Rhode Island, hoping to share first impressions. He told her that he was gay and asked if she had a problem with that — and when she said that she didn’t, that her father was gay, he cut her off to tell her that she was wasting her time. Gretchen should just quit Survivor, Richard told her. The game was going to have only one winner: him.

When the island was glimmering in the distance, the group was divided into two tribes, Pagong and Tagi, which were named after the two beaches. Jeff Probst, the show’s host, announced that they had sixty seconds to grab any tools or equipment. And then, as the cameras swung around, soaking up the anarchy, the castaways raced wildly around the ship, grabbing anything that seemed useful — tarps, machetes — then jumped into the water and scrambled aboard two rafts, rowing desperately toward Pulau Tiga, against the current. It was a brutal marathon to shore, which was more than two hours away. (As bold as the moment was, it could have been even bolder: supervising producer Brady Connell had originally pitched the idea of actually sinking the ship, a plan that fizzled when he couldn’t nail the specs.)

When they arrived, field producer John Russell Feist was waiting on the beach, with a camera operator and a “soundie.” The castaways were vomiting and panicking, but Feist felt over the moon with excitement. A middle-class kid from Texas, he was a daredevil photojournalist who had covered heavy political stories, like a KKK march, as well as tabloid TV, “whatever I had to do to live.” Like several other members of the crew, none of whom had ever worked on a show like this, he’d fought to get this peculiar job, smelling a hit — and now, the scene on the beach confirmed his impulses. The cast’s behavior felt thrillingly real and uncontrived, full of raw emotions that couldn’t be faked.

Unfortunately, there was a catch. When his team was done filming, Feist radioed headquarters to let them know that they were ready to sleep. They told him to go ahead. “And I go, ‘Where do they sleep?’ They go, ‘In the tents.’ And I go, ‘What tents?’” Headquarters put him on hold. As it turned out, there was no plan for the crew’s sleeping arrangements — and they were too far from camp to walk back in the dark. Feist wound up sleeping on the beach for three days, side-by-side with cameras that cost $125,000. Sliding over his body were white sea snakes with tiny jaws, too small to bite, unless they snagged the webs between your fingers. Rats scampered in the sand, running from the snakes.

These conditions would get worse for both the cast and the crew over the next thirty-eight days. That was the paradox of the first season of Survivor: CBS had launched a wildly ambitious, shrewdly structured television show, one that would elevate the scrappy, low-fi reality genre into something more like a slick, hypnotic blockbuster movie. They were inventing new production techniques on the fly — ways to gamify personal relationships, to turn real life into plot points, to make suffering beautiful. But the Survivor production was simultaneously understaffed and under-budgeted, made by people who were underslept and starving. It was a brutal work environment that left those who had endured it even prouder of what they had accomplished, given the conditions they had accomplished them in.

The people with the greatest power were the field producers … Everything they said carried enormous weight, as a guidepost to what was solid and what was an illusion.

Not everyone was okay with this bargain. Right away, one member of the Pagong tribe, the sixty-four-year-old business tycoon B. B. Andersen, wanted out. He cornered Feist on the beach, demanding to speak to Burnett and to hire a helicopter off the island. Feist told him that was impossible: If B. B. wanted to leave, he had to be voted off. Eventually, B. B. gave in. That night, cast and crew took a risky journey, hiking through the pitch-black jungle and the shoreline, with the camera operators walking backward over slippery rocks, heading toward the “tribal council” set, so B. B. could be voted out. He was the second person to leave: The first had been Sonja Christopher, a sixty-three-year-old breast cancer survivor from California, who had stumbled in her ill-fitting Reebok sandals, slipping under the water during the first challenge. It was just six days into the season, and already two out of three of the older cast members had been voted out. The traditional CBS demo would have to root for someone else.

The producers had given each tribe mosquito netting, canned food, and one sack of rice. To eat, they had to fish or forage in the jungle. Water was a mile away. Both tribes struggled to light a fire (in Pagong’s case, they used magnifying eyeglasses that B. B. had snuck in as his “personal item.”) Rats crawled over them while they slept in leaky, makeshift shelters. But on the other side of the island, the crew was dealing with parallel struggles, sleeping in huts and hammocks, nearly as hungry as the cast, unhappy with their servings of “tish,” a local fish stew. Pulau Tiga itself was full of dangers. “Everything on that island wanted to kill you,” Dr. Ondrusek, a psychologist Burnett had met during the taping of an NPR show about thrill-seeking behavior, told me. Snake Island, where the show staged challenges, was notorious for banded sea kraits and venomous vipers; the island was also a handoff point for pirates, which meant that it was patrolled by Australian special forces. Field producer Tom Shelly became so infuriated by monkeys throwing nuts against the huts’ tin roofs, he fantasized about killing one with a slingshot. “I love the outdoors. Used to. Survivor beat that out of me,” joked Shelly.

Amidst this chaos, the castaways struggled to figure out the game: Were you supposed to demonstrate survival skills? Show that you were a leader? Or was the game about something else? It wasn’t clear, at first. On Tagi, river guide Kelly Wiglesworth focused on impressing her teammates, shucking coconuts, trying to make fire in humidity so extreme she felt like she could sip the air with a straw. Early on, she butted heads with the sole remaining member of the older demographic, military veteran Rudy Boesch, who struck her as dead weight. “And I was like, ‘You are the most useless military man ever.’ And he was like, ‘Well, I was a Navy SEAL. We weren’t supposed to build fires… . We weren’t supposed to be seen. I just came in and killed people!’ And I was like, ‘Okay, point taken.’ ”

Neither tribe was truly alone. Camera operators and sound technicians hovered around them, dangling boom mics; tiny, lipstick-sized cameras were tucked into the roofs of the shelters. Executive producer Mark Burnett and his co-producer Craig Piligian often showed up, assuring the cast that their show was going to be a hit. Still, the people with the greatest power were the field producers, scribbling in their yellow Rite in the Rain notepads. They had studied the psychological assessments that were conducted during casting; they understood what was happening in the other tribe; they knew what the next task would be. They were the sixteen castaways’ main link to the nature of the show: Everything they said carried enormous weight, as a guidepost to what was solid and what was an illusion.

Some experiences were undeniably real, however. For cast member Joel Klug, a member of the Pagong Tribe, the turning point came a few days in, during a competition called “Buggin’ Out.” Seated at a table, each tribe was presented with a bowl of live, squirming grubs in dirt. If they didn’t eat one of them, their tribe would lose the competition. “I thought, no way they’d have us eat a live thing on television, but sure enough — holy shit, it was terrible,” Joel told me, still sounding awed, decades later. “That’s when I thought, this is not going to be some little thing. This is going to be crazy, people have never seen anything like this before.”

Excerpted from Penguin Random House’s Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum.