Ahead of an incredible Season 50, Charlie Parsons, the creator of the Survivor format, speaks with TV Tonight.
EXCLUSIVE:
The very first spark of what would eventually become Survivor was a 10 minute segment called ‘The Castaways’ in 1988 in a British youth magazine show, Network 7.
The show’s producer Charlie Parsons, who had an idea to send 4 celebrities to Sri Lanka removed of creature comforts, signalled the start of a Reality TV juggernaut.
“I was in the business of making TV programmes in the UK. Programmes which people talk about. I did this Sunday morning magazine show, which was a show with loads of different things in it, but it was fundamentally journalistic,” he tells TV Tonight.
“It was quite a controversial show on Sundays in Britain…..for instance, in another episode of the show we had a live link from Death Row in Louisiana, and I can’t quite believe I did it now, but we did this thing, asking ‘Do you think this guy should live or die?’
“From nowhere really came the idea, ‘Why don’t we send some people to a desert island and see how they go?’ We sent four minor celebrities to this desert island, which had no (format) structure to it particularly, and followed them for two weeks. One was a soap star on TV here in the UK, one was a a stockbroker, a tennis star, and the other was an ex criminal.”
Parsons, who had ambitions to create formats for his own production company, felt the concept had legs and developed the idea further into Survive, its original title. At the time Reality TV was in its infancy, led by MTV’s Road Rules as observational television.
Cover of the original pitch document
ABC US put some money into development but Parsons recalls there was broad reluctance in several territories to adopt a competition reality show.
“I couldn’t get anyone in the UK to buy it. People would say things like, ‘Can you just make it as a documentary?’ But I was young and ambitious and passionate, and I wasn’t going to do it as a documentary. I knew it had to be a show with a long run. ITV in the UK, said, ‘Can we run it as a two hour special?’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not going to work,’” he insisted.
During this period in LA he met producer Mark Burnett, a fellow Brit, at a party who was excited by the concept -the start of a long conversation in which Parsons repeatedly denied him licensing rights.
After two years ABC’s rights reverted back to Parsons whose bible document by now was so comprehensive he took it to Cannes where Swedish producer SVT and Swedish production company Strix Television showed interest.
By 1997 it debuted in Sweden as Expedition Robinson. There were plenty of lessons learned in that first season in Malaysia.
“We really starved them on the first Swedish one, and that wasn’t a great idea, because the people on the show would hunt around the crew’s bins! We didn’t get the balance quite right because we had never done reality.”
But the hallmarks of the show were present: marooned contestants, challenges, tribes merging, a tribal council, one winner.
Meanwhile Mark Burnett was still hungry for an American version while Parsons found the US challenging.
“I’d had a very bad year making a not-great show in America, because I didn’t get on with the talent. It was quite depressing ….Running my own company in the UK I was king of the castle, but I found it very difficult to be in meetings about why some things weren’t working… I thought, ‘I don’t know that I want to produce (Survive) anymore,’” he recalls.
“When Mark’s call came in regular as clockwork and said, ‘Can I licence it?’ I said, ‘Oh, okay maybe that will work.’”
It would prove to be fortuitous for all with Burnett leaning into the lessons of Sweden and supersizing the show for CBS, which at the time was trailing as the fourth US network.
Survivor US Season 1 in Borneo
“Mark was brilliant at pitching it. I was quite good at pitching it, but he’s, he’s a brilliant pitcher. He shared the same big vision, but his was even bigger. He was the one who changed the name to Survivor. I went to the first season, filming one of the challenges where contestants were standing on logs in the in the sea, and I remember thinking, ‘My goodness, he’s got 20 cameras on this.’ In the UK, we would have three. That’s what was different,” he acknowledges.
Burnett also hired Jeff Probst, who is now about to host his 50th season of the show.
“That was also Mark. I didn’t know the American talent, I’d not seen Jeff Probst. He’d been doing various things, like Entertainment Tonight and so on. I was always keen that it would be an unknown actually, but (Jeff) was a master stroke. And little did we know how great a master stroke it was going to be, because obviously 25 years later, he’s still doing it and he knows the game in a more intimate way than anybody.”
The 2000 US season, with $1m won by Richard Hatch, took off. Its first 11 seasons rated among the top 10 most-watched shows in the USA.
Fast forward 26 years and the show now has some 40 international versions, and more than a few copycat shows borrowing from its format turning points -Parsons even took Banijay to court over Big Brother similarities and lost, ironically later selling his Castaway Television Production to the same company.
“I knew it was a big show, I just knew it was something very different to what was on TV, and I really believed in it,” he continues. “I look back and think, ‘God, I really did have some guts not to actually take the offer of making it,’ which is what you’re always tempted to do as a TV producer. I just didn’t want to make it for less than it should be. I didn’t want to make it as a documentary or a two hour special, because we’d worked on it, and I knew it had legs, and it was something entirely different to what you could see on TV at the time. We even had in part of the sales pitch, some mock up covers of Newsweek or Time magazine with the picture of the survivors, which weirdly came to pass!”
S1 billboard on Sunset Boulevard
Survivor has generated fanbases around the world, many of whom have strong opinions around production choices, casting and format twists: season themes, Immunity idols, Redemption Island and more.
But Parsons, who last stepped on set in 2016, takes a more holistic approach to it all.
“Sometimes ideas come from other versions and are tried in other places before they go there and vice versa. The way I look at it is, you have to try these things in order to see whether they work or not. You might try them for one season, they don’t quite work, or you might try them for one season and bring it back, because it didn’t quite work,” he says.
“I watch the show from a very sort of neutral position, not knowing exactly what’s coming up. It sounds so weird, but I’m almost not critical of the show because I’m so involved in the lives of the contestants.”
Season 50 “In the Hands of the Fans” will bring back returning players and hallmarks of the show as voted by fans through official social media platforms.
“It’s bringing back a lot of the brilliant elements that have made up a number of seasons. Basically, it’s all about people at the end of the day. Some favourites are back. I’m particularly excited to see Mike White back, the writer of The White Lotus. But there’s a load of interesting people coming back so it should be great.”
Parsons also credits Australian Survivor, having seen several episodes over the years, often regarded as highly, if not more, than Survivor USA.
“Knowing how different the budgets are it’s incredible. To be honest, I can’t speak for them, but I suspect that that’s what Burnett’s people think about it too, because it’s an incredible show that happens in Australia.”
Survivor has also evolved in its diversity on screen. For Parsons, who describes the format as “incredibly democratic,” it is how Reality TV can reflect wider change.
“Right from the beginning it was reflecting society as it was,” he maintains. “Remember, the first American winner was Richard Hatch, who was openly gay. The idea of a network show having an openly gay, naked winner … Obviously things have moved on a lot, and we’re more aware than we were then. When I talk about the democratisation of TV, I think Survivor has led and reflected how people are in a big way.
“It’s fantastic that people are talking about neuro diversity on TV and taking part in what are extremely challenging circumstances. What’s so great about that is people watching it understand a bit more. There were so many closed doors and windows on these people. You never saw people who are different from you, on the whole.”
He adds, “But you can be a hero, whether you’re neurodiverse, trans or married in a straight relationship.”
What is his message to the millions of fans for the show around the world?
“I’m so glad you’re still enjoying it. And yes, you may get annoyed. You may not like some of the things, but we hope that you like most of the things that are in it. Most of the people, most of the things that they do, and you like the heroes who win. That’s what we want.”
And lastly, 50 seasons on, what future does he see for the show?
“I knew it was an amazing show, but I never thought it would be this long. All the evolutionary twists have given it a long life, so I think it could go on for another 50 seasons. When they relaunched it with a different number of episodes in the ‘new era’ it’s proof that if your team is amazing, and you’re sufficiently brave to basically make changes you can turn it into new things,” he says.
“The biggest threat which we thought might happen was that, because Survivor is recorded we could see all these reality shows which were Live with phone voting. But we stuck to our guns, and made sure that it just had enough interest and variety and we kept it going.
“So I think it could go for another 50.”
Updated. Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans screens 3:30pm AEDT Thursday on Stan
Australian Survivor is now screening on 10.