The tribal council fire still flickers, and Jeff Probst has barely aged a day since the Bush administration. But as Survivor debuts its landmark 50th season on Wednesday, it now feels almost quaint. Not because the show is no longer compelling, but because the real world has evolved into a version of it.

Reality TV was still in its infancy when Survivor first premiered on CBS a quarter-century ago, and it’s difficult to overstate how massive a cultural impact it made. Roughly 140 million people worldwide watched Richard Hatch, a 39-year-old corporate trainer from Rhode Island, navigate gruelling physical and social challenges as he was chosen as the so-called Sole Survivor in August 2000. The season one finale became the second-most-watched television programme of the decade (excluding sports fixtures) and reshaped the medium, heralding the ascendancy of reality TV as the defining format of the 21st century.

Some of its success was due to its novelty. Back in 2000, Survivor’s premise felt transgressive: strangers marooned together and forced to form alliances, betray one another, and perform unscripted versions of themselves for a national audience, all in pursuit of a $1 million prize. It was marketed as a return to the primitive — an atavistic test of what remains when the veneer of civilisation is stripped away and humanity is glimpsed in a more authentic state.

But what we actually witnessed was less an echo of the unmediated past than the blueprint for the next quarter-century of human interaction. Perhaps the show’s most prophetic contribution is the mandate to be “real” while staring directly into a camera lens. Long before the Instagram reel or TikTok, Survivor taught a generation how to perform sincerity and vulnerability under constant surveillance. Due to influencer culture, there are now countless people talking into cameras daily, curating their struggles for an audience of unseen jurors who decide their social and economic value.

Likewise, the show’s central tension — the tribe versus the individual — also anticipated the exact social relations of the internet. On Survivor, as on X, Substack, or in the hyper-polarised political landscape, you find your alliance or your tribe, adopt their colours, and ruthlessly “other” the opposition. But the experience offers belonging without solidarity: it’s tight-knit in name, but always temporary. The goal of the modern digital actor, like the Survivor contestant, is to use the collective as a ladder to individual prominence.

We see this daily in “cancel culture” cycles: a group — on the Left, Right, or centre — casts someone out, in part because participating in the purge generates attention and secures one’s own status within the remaining group. Until, of course, the numbers shift and the alliance dissolves.

In the show’s early years, playing Survivor with a calculated strategy was often viewed by the audience — and the contestants — as a kind of moral failing. Richard Hatch was once seen as a major TV villain who betrayed his pact with fellow contestant Kelly Wiglesworth to secure his win. The ideal winner was supposed to look surprised by victory, as if triumph had found them by accident rather than design.

But as Survivor continued, Machiavellian gameplay became the norm. Contestants began keeping physically strong or high-threat players around to act as meat shields, ruthlessly creating and breaking alliances, or changing the narrative about themselves to help rig the jury. They defended acting dishonourably as “playing the game” because the only thing worth doing was winning the grand prize. Viewers no longer find the show shocking because they have been living its logic daily. Office politics, social media pile-ons, influencer feuds, and the theatre of public confession have rendered Survivor familiar to the point of banality.

This helps explain why Survivor now feels strangely inert, and MrBeast — who has 468 million YouTube subscribers — has been the only person to keep the old formula fresh. His Amazon Prime reality contest Beast Games, which features a crossover episode with Survivor this season, is best described as Probst’s show meets Netflix’s Squid Game for the hyper-caffeinated YouTube era. It’s a dystopian game show in which MrBeast incentivises alliance members to betray each other constantly in pursuit of the ultimate $5 million prize, all while asking his pre-teen audience to scan a QR code to sell them predatory banking apps.

Its audience now dwarfs that of Survivor’s, suggesting there’s never been a better time to go live somewhere alone on a remote desert island.

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Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.

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