![]() ![]() Burnett had been a marginal figure in Hollywood, but after this triumph he, too, was rebranded, as an oracle of spectacle. The catchphrase delivered by the host, Jeff Probst, at the end of each elimination ceremony, “The tribe has spoken,” entered the lexicon. The first season was set in Borneo, and from the moment it aired, on CBS, in 2000, “Survivor” was a ratings juggernaut: according to the network, a hundred and twenty-five million Americans-more than a third of the population-tuned in for some portion of the season finale. Burnett had previously worked in sales and had a knack for branding. “Lord of the Flies” was one of his favorite books, and after he heard about “Expedition: Robinson” he secured the rights to make an American version. In 1998, a thirty-eight-year-old former British paratrooper named Mark Burnett was living in Los Angeles, producing television. You felt embarrassed watching it, Stockselius said, but “you couldn’t stop.” “Expedition: Robinson” offered a potent cocktail of repulsion and attraction. ![]() “We had never seen anything like it,” Svante Stockselius, the chief of the network that produced the program, told the Los Angeles Times, in 2000. ![]() Even so, there was a backlash, with one critic asserting that a program based on such merciless competition was “fascist television.” But everyone watched the show anyway, and Savija was soon forgotten. The producers dealt with this tragedy by suggesting that Savija’s turmoil was unrelated to the series-and by editing him virtually out of the show. Upon returning to Sweden, he was morose, complaining to his wife that the show’s editors would “cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool.” Nine weeks before the show aired, he stepped in front of a speeding train. The show’s title alluded to both “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but a more apt literary reference might have been “Lord of the Flies.” The first contestant who was kicked off was a young man named Sinisa Savija. To survive, they must coöperate, but they are also competing: each week, a member of the ensemble is voted off the island, and the final contestant wins a grand prize. “Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish reality-television program, premièred in the summer of 1997, with a tantalizing premise: sixteen strangers are deposited on a small island off the coast of Malaysia and forced to fend for themselves. ![]()
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