Survivor changed reality TV. Now it’s celebrating its 50th season

Hartley Jafine was flipping through the channels on a Wednesday night in 2000 when he happened upon a show where two groups of people were stranded on the remote Malaysian island of Pulau Tiga, competing to light a series of torches.

The winning team would get 50 waterproof matches to assist in their survival, and the right to stay on the island for at least a few days longer. The losing team would have to choose one of their own to leave the island.

“I was fascinated by that idea of, oh, they just competed together as a team, and now they've got to eat one of their own,” said Jafine, a professor at McMaster University, where alongside teaching courses on the intersection of theatre, improv and health care, he leads a course on Survivor. 

Jafine, who was 15 at the time, was watching the very first episode of the reality TV show Survivor: a show that would  create super fans, alter the landscape of reality television and inspire countless other shows. 

Now, 25 years and hundreds of contestants later, the show will air its 50th season on Feb. 25, which will include Canadians Kamilla Karthigesu, originally from Toronto and now living in California, and Genevieve Mushaluk from Winnipeg. 

“As I go through each stage of the [season] 50 process, you know through casting, through the marooning, through actually playing the game, it sort of hits me a little more and more each time where I kind of understand how big this is,” said Karthigesu, who came close to winning in Season 48, but was the last person voted out, finishing fourth.

The premise of that first season of Survivor, hosted by Jeff Probst, was simple: 16 contestants had to survive on an island for 39 days, all the while competing in challenges and voting other people off the island, with the aim of becoming the sole survivor. 

“It was really fascinating to think about, what are the reasons why one might be ejected from the show and that got me hooked from moment one,” said Jafine.

At the end of the show, seven of the people who were voted out decided who of the final two contestants deserved the game’s million dollar prize.

It was an overnight sensation. Over 50 million people tuned in to watch Richard Hatch claim the title of sole survivor in the season finale.

It wasn’t the first reality TV show, or even the first of its kind, being derived from a similar Swedish series called Expedition Robinson, which premiered in 1997. 

But Erin Meyers, a communications professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., says Survivor was the first major reality TV success on a U.S. broadcast network, in primetime.

“This was different from what most people were seeing on television at that time,” she said.

“Particularly the focus on real people as the contestants, the unusual and over the top kind of challenges and situations that they were put in. And so I think it really opened a door for different kinds of entertainment to flourish at that moment.”