Not content with my annual shedding of cricket subscribers by posting about Australian Survivor, or my post-season exodus of Survivor fans as a result of all the cricket coverage, here’s yet another Venn diagram piece, designed specifically to satisfy nobody. Stay subscribed after this, if you dare!
In part one, I compared bottom-up drama, where rules are set out through which opposing sides can conflict with one another and the drama arises naturally from that (e.g. sport) with top-down drama, where some kind of author decrees what happens and builds drama in that way (e.g. virtually all other sources of stories).
But there’s a strange middle-ground between those two extremes. And it’s a middle-ground occupied by competitive reality television, perhaps best exemplified by the grandfather of such shows, Survivor.
Most non-fans’ response to hearing fans talk about Survivor is the somewhat tedious ‘Wait, Survivor? Is that show still on?’. And yeah, it is. At the time of writing, the 49th US season has just commenced, and an Australian season pitting Australia’s best players against a smattering of international greats has just concluded.
But the very question of Survivor’s ongoing status kind of proves my point. Forty-nine seasons of a scripted television show is, indeed, bonkers. But you wouldn’t ask ‘Cricket? Is that sport still on?’ each summer. So Survivor, in this aspect at least, falls closer to the sport end of the spectrum than it does the television show end.
Survivor, for those who don’t know, involves sixteen to twenty people (or more in Australian Survivor) being stranded on an island. At the end of each episode, a player is voted off by their fellow competitors until only three (or sometimes two) players remain. And then the players voted off (the ‘jury’) vote on which of those final remaining players deserve to win the game and the million dollar prize that goes with it.
It’s a game of social and strategic scheming, as alliances are built and destroyed, trust is gained and lost and devious schemes are planned, executed and hilariously botched. And it’s played by sleep and food-deprived competitors, all of whom were sufficiently crazy to apply for the show in the first place, and so socially abnormal that they stood out above all other applicants.
Like any sport, but particularly cricket, there are all kinds of esoteric rules for very specific Survivor situations. For example, what do you do when there’s a tie on a given vote? Well, obviously, you make all the voters (except for those who received the tied votes) draw rocks at random and the one who draws a purple rock goes home. Except, of course, on those occasions where those who were voted for must instead compete to see who can most quickly make fire.
But why do the tie-breaker rules work this way, you ask? Hey, let’s talk about the LBW Law, I reply.
In theory, Survivor could be played as a pure sport, with no cameras recording it. In practice, of course, it remains first and foremost a television show. Which means the rules of the game are more fluid. The producers of the show are regularly dropping new twists and unexpected challenges into the mix, with the goal of creating fresh conflict between the players.
And that’s the point where Survivor starts to move away from the simple bottom-up drama of a sport and back towards the more top-down drama of a creative work.
But it’s a fine balance for the producers. They can’t favour any given player - as a television game show, there are legal restrictions that explicitly prevent this.
All they can do is create situations and environments that tempt players to make dramatic game decisions. For the most part, they succeed, but there are certainly episodes or seasons of the show that are duller than others. And much like sport, those usually come about when one player is so much better than the others and the result of the game is in very little doubt.
It’s no coincidence, for example, that Survivor: One World, featuring one of the game’s greatest ever players, Kim Spradlin, towering over all her rivals, is also widely considered to be one of Survivor’s dullest seasons, as she methodically charmed and manipulated her way to a predictable victory. In contrast, one of the contenders for the best ever season was won by Tony Vlachos, the Glenn Maxwell of Survivor, who played a madcap game that defied all the standard principles of how one should go about winning and yet somehow, against all odds, pulled off the most unorthodox victory ever seen. (Tony would also go on to win Survivor’s 40th season, against a field of all winners, staking his own claim as one of the game’s greatest.)
So, in that sense, we’re back to something more akin to sport, where satisfying drama arises because of unpredictable triumphs.
But Survivor has one more trick up its sleeve that cricket and other sports lack. And that trick is editing, which allows the show to retroactively shape a story around the events that took place.
Survivor takes place over (originally-39-but-now) 26 days, but is edited down to a dozen or so 43 (but-sometimes-65) minute-long episodes, plus a double-length final episode. Which allows for drama to be introduced by editing out tedious sections of the game, or sections that make it obvious who is going to win.
And with the inclusion of editing in the mix, we push Survivor once again further towards the top-down authorial end of the drama continuum. These events all happened. But the dramatic satisfaction of the story comes from the way the events are presented by the show.
In this way, Survivor (and other similar competitive reality TV shows) occupy a hybrid middle ground between sport and scripted drama.
And it makes me wonder… what would a version of cricket look like that underwent a similar editing treatment? We already have highlights packages, of course, but that’s not really what I’m thinking of.
I’m thinking instead of an edit of the footage specifically put together to obscure as long as possible the likely winner. An edit that maximises the drama and conflict of the contest. Maybe with confessionals from the players involved. With inspirational music underneath stirring montages. With turning points in the game left as end-of-episode cliffhangers to get viewers coming back for more.
Given its length, cricket is the perfect vehicle for this kind of Survivorised edit of a match. I don’t know how many episodes there would be or how long each episode might run for in my hypothetical edited version, but, regardless, I think it would make a fascinating project to explore. Particularly for, say, somebody with better video editing skills and more spare time than me.
Of course, the major problem to overcome with this hypothetical reimagining of cricket, and the real reason this can’t possibly work is that too many people enjoy cricket in its current form. Too many people watch it live, in a way that Survivor is not watched.
Survivor works as well as it does because the on-island outcome is unknown to viewers as these edited-down, dramatically highlighted versions of events are broadcast months later on television. You could only properly do a Survivorised edit of cricket if pretty much nobody had seen the game.
Which is why, of course, I think it should be trialled with the Sheffield Shield.
Over to you, Cricket Australia.