‘Survivor’ creator looks back at 25 years of real-life success

A handful of people are credited with changing the face of television. Among them is the mercurial Briton Charlie Parsons, the creator of “Survivor”.

As the reality giant celebrates its 25th anniversary, Parsons, who has reinvented early morning television in the UK by shedding long-established traditions of form for the messy “Big Breakfast,” believes there are many reasons why “Survivor” has defied Odds are, well, surviving for a long time.

“The stories of ordinary people are interesting. How they approach the situations they find themselves in is interesting. The important thing about Survivor was that it was almost like a sport.” “The show is very careful about its contestants, all of whom are champions. It is not exploitation and it is not watched and ridiculed.”

He adds that in this show, the cast is not looking to be famous but instead “obsessed with the strategy and tactics of the game.”

“That’s what makes ‘Survivor’ so unique. I’m so proud of the show. It was part of the democratization of television. What I didn’t know was that it would result in a lot of copies and imitations.”

There may be a touch of sadness. He once sued Endemol claiming that “Big Brother” was a theft from “Survivor”. He lost his case, but Parsons, equally known for his short aperture and charm, never doubted that what would eventually become known as “Survivor” would one day become a global hit and effectively create what we now know as reality television.

It is instructive to note that while the show airs its 43rd season in the United States on CBS, the show’s origins date back to 1988. At the time, Parsons was working on a cutting-edge British show Network 7, aimed squarely at those under 25 common people who tended to avoid mainstream TV because it wasn’t great.

He was determined to push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable on television – and he never accepted. Typically, a segment from “Network 7” casts a direct vote on whether an inmate should live or die in a US death row prison. The idea was abandoned.

A member of Parsons’ team dreamed up another trick of planting the seed that would eventually sprout “Survivor”.

Scholar Murray Boland suggested in Peter Bazalgette’s “The Billion Dollar Game,” a book that tells the stories of “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” and “What Would One Want to Be a Millionaire?”

Parsons became obsessed with the idea and the Sri Lanka Tourism Authority was persuaded to move a group of young celebrities, including a British soap star, to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.

Without knowing it, Parsons and his colleagues devised the Modern Celebrity Reality Show, Bazalgette wrote.

For four weeks in 1988, the results of this test run of what would become “Survivor” on “Network 7” continued. It went largely unnoticed, but Parsons saw the potential for a truly groundbreaking series.

Fast-forward to 1994 and the 30-year-old TV producer, who hit “The Big Breakfast”, was in the United States where he signed a development deal with Disney’s distribution arm, Buena Vista. ABC was interested in his embryonic television show, which featured 16 competitors stranded on a remote island. The idea failed to get the green light.

Parsons remained unfazed. ABC envisioned the show as a special. Its creator was determined “Survivor” – then called “Survive” – ​​it had to be a long-range string in order to make noise.

Back in Europe, the idea was further refined – crucially, the format included a popularity contest where contestants voted for each other off the island one by one.

“It got a lot of attention from Granada, but ITV didn’t want to run it as a 13-episode series,” Parsons recalls. “I refused to do it, which in hindsight was very brave of me. Andy Harris [who went on to form Left Bank] He was the hero of the show.”

Finally, in 1997, Swedish publisher SVT agreed to make the show, titled “Expedition Robinson”. At a cost of £2 million, the series was the most expensive commission in Swedish television history. By the last episode, “Expedition Robinson” was Sweden’s most popular show. A second series has been ordered as other Scandinavian countries prepare to release their own editions.

But Parsons was watching the grand prize – an American commission. To help him, he agrees to license the show to Mark Burnett, a once British soldier who fought in the Falkland Islands, turned into an aspiring Hollywood-based television entertainment show maker.

“He wanted so badly to produce it,” Parsons recalls. “It worked because he understood America so much better than I did. It was a big idea, but his style of shooting made it even bigger. He was crucial in the process.”

“It convinced people I wouldn’t be able to wear it. There was almost no danger to CBS, because at the time CBS wasn’t doing well. It was all a win for CBS. Mark Burnett made it Fascinating, cinematic and phenomenal.”

Lucas Green, Banijay’s global head of content operations, praised “Survivor” as “the original, simplest and best of its kind…the ultimate reality adventure show.” Banijay holds the global rights to the format, having acquired Parsons’ company, Castaway, in 2017.

Greene credits the figure’s longevity with being “full of danger and human drama, fueled by a diverse cast, and always set against a tropical paradise synonymous with show.”

He adds, “Imitators can’t compete, because all of these elements combine to make Survivor truly unique and enduringly successful.”

Despite being a global phenomenon with 50 global commissions to date, in the UK, it has always been overshadowed by reality challengers including “Big Brother” and “I’m a celebrity…get me out of here!” In the past, the song Survivor was all rejected by BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

The show eventually ran only two seasons on ITV, after it was dropped in 2002 – a move Parsons admits was a “huge disappointment”.

“When he was on ITV, he was very well rated and got amazing reviews. But it wasn’t very well planned. It just wasn’t quite right.”

However, that may change as the BBC is about to restart “Survivor”. Expectations are growing that this reality TV giant could finally become a winner on its creators’ land when it bends to BBC One next year.

“Now is the time to make their mark in the UK, as audiences have a huge appetite for the reality of the abstract arc. This has an important role to play in on-demand services like BBC iPlayer,” says Green. Survivor will be a clickable box set, with all the hallmarks of our new favorite genre, the unscripted thriller.

Parsons remains an executive producer for the American version but has spread his creative energies into other areas outside of television, including helping to bring the fantasy music of Bob Dylan, “The Girl from the North Country” to the stage.

However, he feels great affection for a show that not only changed television, but also made him a rich man.

So, could ‘Survivor’ go on for another 25 years?

“The amazing thing is how incredibly new ‘Survivor’ is,” he says. “You’ve got this life. The arc of TV formats is that they run a long time, sometimes have a little gap in them, and then come up again in a slightly different way. Yes is the answer. It certainly can.”

And Parsons has a knack for eventually proving him right.