12/30/2023 0 Comments Survivor the ultimate game![]() Laid-back Gervase said, "Nothing's dumber than a woman, except maybe a cow," amusing "alpha male" Joel and enraging Jenna, Colleen, and Gretchen (IQ 142). Air Force survival trainer Gretchen ("She was wholesome, she was a survivalist, she looked great in a bathing suit"), most of the contestants were nice as pythons. It gives you a better feel than TV can for the natural setting: pristine beaches infested with skin-burrowing bugs that scarred "coquette" Colleen for life Malaysian field rats attracted by the survivors' food and crawling over them all night six-foot, yellow-and-black-banded sea kraits (snakes) devouring the rats 300-pound pythons reeking of rotting meat, poised to drop from trees and eat people.Įxcept for the crew's hands-down favorite, U.S. While the contestants gobbled wriggling three-inch beetles and savaged each other, Burnett and company were feverishly running the show and writing this tell-all account. What's new about this book is the view from the other side of the lens. Its creator, Mark Burnett, calls the show " Gilligan's Island meets Lord of the Flies meets Ten Little Indians meets The Real World," but you knew that. Burnett, next time, focus your attention on what you do best- making a great TV show- and hire somebody else to write the book.After months of tighter-than-CIA secrecy, here is the exclusive inside story of the TV smash Survivor. The photos are merely pointless headshots of the castaways, presented without captions and placed randomly throughout the book. Well, he should have! It's called rewriting, and it's part of what makes books entertaining to the reader. The problem becomes clear at the very end of the book, when Burnett reveals that he wrote the book entirely when he was on the island and didn't change a word afterward. (Were the producers behind the false rumors about Gervase winning? How about that doctored opening-credits shot of the supposed "final four"? We'll never know.) Rather than a companion piece to the show, it's merely a retelling, and a sloppy one at that. Also, there's no commentary about anything that happened after the castaways left the island. There are LOOOOOOOOOOONG descriptions some of the travails of the crew and the stormy conditions of the sea, and extremely little new light is shed on the actual contestants of the show. But Mark Burnett seems to be under the impression that he's writing a novel - and "The Great Gatsby" at that. What a disappointment! As a HUGE fan of the show, I couldn't wait to read this. Without putting too much spit on the pitch, I think that the show transcended entertainment and took the reader into the realm of literary drama because of the insight it offered the viewer into the human complexities of such a situation. In hindsight the game's outcome was known before the first Challenge, if only I'd been as good an observer as Burnett. Had I not read his book I would not have appreciated the extraordinary drama that took place-the drama of Pagong and their immaturity in regard to virtually all aspects of the establishment of a viable community and that failure led ultimately to their destruction. It was as if the show that I viewed every week was simply the building that was visible above the ground but the complexity of the foundations that allowed the structure to stand were totally hidden until they were pointed out and examined by Burnett. I was impressed with these psychological threads that he teased out of life on the island to the viewer these were seemingly random acts made by the island participants. Burnett wrote, however, a far more substantive story of the psychological factors that motivated the participants. I didn't expect Burnett's book to be so cerebral: I expected a very long journalistic expose of "the hidden secrets of life on the island". I have just completed Mark Burnett's book and I am very impressed with his sensitive and rational analysis of the events on Pulau Tiga culminating with Richard Hatch leaving the island as the ultimate winner.
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