With Friends Like These...

How the Hell is This Show Still So Relevant 20 Years Later?

By: Jeff McDonough

Monday was the 236^th day of the year, as August 24 always is on non-leap years. The significance of this date — beyond being Cal Ripken’s 55^th birthday — is that if you started watching Friends on a strict episode-a-day regimen when Netflix released all 236 episodes after the ball dropped this New Year’s, you’d be all finished! In reality, nobody binge-watches TV this way, with that level of self-control. You either end up getting distracted by something else and flaking on your show, or you power through it in embarrassingly quick fashion with only Doritos crumbs in your bed and a laptop burn on your tummy to show for it.

Regardless, there has been adequate time for anyone interested in doing so to run through the entire series, whether for the first time or the 51^st time. Why does this deal even matter? The episodes have been in reruns nonstop, since even before the show ended, on TBS and Nick at Nite and many local broadcast affiliates. Well, the answer to this question is really a sign of how things are in 2015 in general: we want our content when we want it however we want it.

Survivor Turns 15

A Look at the Finale of the Show's Groundbreaking First Season on Its Anniversary

By: Jeff McDonough

This Sunday marks the 15-year anniversary of the finale of the influential first season of Survivor. On August 23, 2000, corporate consultant Richard Hatch defeated whitewater rafting guide Kelly Wiglesworth on a 4-3 vote from his peers to win Survivor: Borneo and the million-dollar prize. Sixteen Americans had been chosen to live on a remote island for 39 days without any modern comforts and vote each other off one by one until there was one “Sole Survivor” remaining — while millions watched on national and worldwide television. This was truly a revolutionary concept by series creator Mark Burnett and could’ve ended in disaster. This wasn’t a documentary. This wasn’t a game show. This was “reality television.” We had seen isolated incidents of this type of thing permeating into the TV landscape before. COPS had already been on for a decade, but the premise was familiar and it was stashed away on Saturday nights. The Real World thrived in the ‘90s with MTV on basic cable. Survivor was a different animal. It aired in primetime on network TV, serving as the 8 p.m. anchor for a CBS weeknight block, and took the monetary investment of shooting on location with a large production crew on a near-desert island in northeast Malaysia. The success of the show ultimately resulted in the dawning of a new era in television — for better or worse.

The finale that night in 2000, was the conclusion of 13 weeks of unique storytelling and an astonishing 51.7 million viewers in the U.S. tuned in to watch. That is the second most watched episode of television this century so far — that “episode” designation obviously omits special events like the Super Bowl. The only other television show that has had an episode reach 50 million viewers in the post-Y2K era was the series finale of Friends in 2004 at 52.5 million. Even further than that, an estimate was reported by Neilsen that 125 million people tuned in for at least some portion of the Survivor: Borneo finale. That is simply staggering. So what captivated the country so much about Survivor that they tuned in in droves to see how it would end?