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?
