On a hot March day in 2000, 16 ordinary Americans arrived on the beaches of Borneo to participate in a grand new experiment: a television show called Survivor. Reality competition was still new, and no one — not even the show’s top brass — knew exactly what they were making or how the next 39 days would play out. But one contestant seemed certain of how it would end. “I’ve got the million-dollar check written already. I mean, I’m the winner,” Richard Hatch told the camera in his first “confessional” interview. He was playing up his confidence, performing a cheeky swagger.
He also was right: Hatch won the first season of Survivor. And with that win, he wrote the first playbook. On Survivor you could perform — play a more ruthless, more cutthroat, heightened version of yourself — and if that persona told the most compelling story, not necessarily the truest, you could win. Even now, with Survivor’s landmark 50th season coming to an end, that playbook can still be seen in the game. But it can also be felt beyond it, in the political culture of this country — one in which ruthlessness and fraudulent fear-mongering can outperform decency and truth in the fight for power.
The Birth of the Reality Villain
As early as the casting process, Hatch understood he had to entertain. “I wasn’t just me; I was me beyond, me on steroids,” he told me 25 years later, while I was reporting my book, Survivor Legends, which came out this month. In one of his final interviews to get on the show, Hatch walked into a conference room with Executive Producer Mark Burnett and other CBS executives, but he didn’t sit down. “I put my hand on the chair and I said, ‘Listen, you know you’re gonna pick me. What you don’t know is I’m gonna win.’” He walked out to them laughing. Casting director Lynne Spillman remembers seeing Hatch sitting in the lobby taking notes on the other potential contestants. She didn’t understand what he was doing at the time, but now she does: “He was already playing Survivor.”
Hatch brought this heightened self — witty, confident, perspicacious — to the game, and was ready to play hard to win the $1 million prize. The game’s rules were clear to him: outwit, outplay, outlast. Do what it takes to win. He created the first alliance — a strategy that is now core to the game — to gain numerical power, sewed seeds of distrust among friends so they would turn on each other, and made false promises to shape the game in his favor. These strategies are par for the course to modern Survivor viewers, but at the time they were shocking.
The Moral Innovation of Reality TV
This was the moral innovation of Survivor: it asked ordinary people to play themselves on television, in a game that required them to behave in ways they might reject in ordinary life. Ruthlessness could be understood as performance. Lying was “gameplay,” justified for the win. The island contained the game. The logic proved harder to contain.
At the finale, Hatch and Wigglesworth each made their case to the jury of players they had eliminated. Wigglesworth asked to be judged by who she was. Hatch said it was the better player, not the better person, who should win. In one of the most iconic speeches in reality TV history, Wisconsin truck driver, Sue Hawk — once an ally, later betrayed — compared Hatch and Wigglesworth to the two things that filled their island home: snakes and rats. With torchlight flickering in her eyes, she said Hatch was a snake who knowingly went after his prey and Wigglesworth, a rat who scurried around fecklessly. “I feel we owe it to the island’s spirit…to let it be, in the end, the way Mother Nature intended it to be: for the Snake to eat the Rat.” More than 51 million Americans tuned in as she placed the deciding vote for Richard Hatch. This inaugural jury set a new precedent: snakes would win Survivor.
From the Island to the Oval Office
After years of hustling, Survivor’s booming popularity turned Executive Producer Mark Burnett into a champion of the genre. He produced The Voice, Shark Tank, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader. His search for a host for The Apprentice led him to the brash, tabloid-friendly and financially flailing New York real estate tycoon, Donald Trump. Burnett offered Trump a job and something more: the opportunity to perform himself as successful and decisive. It was a chance for Trump to escape his failures, a weekly platform to develop this new, powerful character. As that performance grew, and eventually sought real power, the rules of the game were already established: the better player, not the better person, wins. Lies and ruthlessness were acceptable in pursuit of the ultimate win.
Twenty-five years after Hatch’s win, Survivor’s 49th finale was interrupted: Trump, now president, was delivering a primetime address. He spoke of a country being “invaded” by millions of migrants coming out of “prisons and jails and mental institutions,” with the worst inflation “in the history of our country.” Then he boasted that he had fixed these problems, creating more positive change than any “administration in American history.” The truth — reality — seemed to matter less than selling his success convincingly. An hour later, the season’s finalists on Fiji made their own case to the jury, propagandizing their games, presenting a narrative a majority of voters would accept. The logic Burnett saw on that Borneo evening of the first finale in 2000 now defined his most consequential performer.