Television is without a doubt the most influential medium, and its effect on New Orleans’ recovery is no small potatoes. There have been great moments of enlightenment (Spike Lee’s documentary comes to mind) and giant steps backward ( just about every time the mayor speaks into a microphone).
Each image projected from here frames our story, gives the nation the information it needs to decide our fate.
And although the upcoming Monday Night Football extravaganza will provide a huge spike in presumably positive publicity, I can’t help but feel we missed a golden opportunity by not luring CBS to bring its Survivor franchise here this season.
Survivor: Cook Island, the thirteenth edition of the landmark reality series, drew more viewers for its premiere last Thursday night than Dancing with the Stars, and if that doesn’t speak to the profound dominance of its intellectual content, I don’t know what does.
Its ratings were no doubt boosted by the risky gimmick to segregate the four “tribes” on the show into ethnic classifications: Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian.
The producers have gone to great lengths to tell us how difficult it was to draw these tribes from an application pool that was almost entirely Caucasian—white folks historically having a stronger congenital predisposition toward exposing their character flaws on television (see: Jerry Springer, The Gong Show, et al.).
But the producers would have had it easy if they’d come to New Orleans. They’d have found exactly what they were looking for without incurring the expense of dragging production crews halfway around the globe: a physical and emotional environment teeming with danger, adventure, and challenge, and a community already divided into four ethnic components, all eyeing one another warily, suspiciously, each trying to maneuver its interests to the fore.
Throw in the elements of questionable drinking water, a rodent population larger than its human counterpart, lots of mosquitoes, and the imminent possibility of getting capped by three teens in a stolen Range Rover and it’s almost sublime: Survivor: New Orleans.
We’re already the most interesting reality show on TV—except we’re confined to the second half of the nightly news twice a week. Why didn’t anyone think to get a major advertising sponsor and put us on prime time?
What are they thinking in New York and L.A?
What an opportunity lost.
Imagine how the traditional thematic elements of Survivor—shelter, safety, nourishment, water, comfort, teamwork, mental rigor, physical toughness, and political acumen—would have played out here.
Survivor’s appeal is to show how contestants—everyday people like you and me, except maybe a little stupider and better-looking—are able to withstand life without power, water, food, bathing, transportation, communication, government, and all other creature comforts for thirty-nine days.
You call that tough? I call it “home.”
If you put the four Cook Island tribes in the middle of City Park, I bet it would take them a week to find their way out. They could boil lagoon water to quench their thirst and hunt raccoons for food. Imagine a moment of desperation—one of Survivor’s trademark emotional bloodlettings—when an inconsolable contestant finds out she’s been living on the sixth fairway of a golf course and what she thought was a nest of edible egret eggs under an oak canopy were actually Titleists and Callaways badly shanked by investment bankers skipping work back in the summer of 2005.
They could have one tribe live in a pothole, one in a tent under the interstate, one in a FEMA trailer (it goes without saying that it has no utilities), and one in what remains of Fats Domino’s house down in the Lower 9th and let them try to survive the tangle of living options and deprivations that we have come to know as routine.
Better yet, one of the tribes could be embedded with Uncle Sal and Aunt Judy in their two-bedroom rambler in River Ridge, along with Sal’s two grown sons and Judy’s ex, C.J., and his fourth wife, Tina, and their two kids and four dogs, Sal’s nephew Gerald and his family of six and Gerald’s son Tony’s parrain, Sid, and his boyfriend, Jeff, and their two cats—and then they will know what “surviving” means in the post-Katrina landscape.
Admittedly, much of life in the suburbs has played out less like a reality adventure series and more like a prime-time sitcom pilot—Look Who’s Living Together Now!—as extended families and their nagging ancillary units bunk together under the oppressive climate of contractor delays in Gentilly.
But I digress.
To test the mental endurance of the contestants, they could be forced to acquire building permits, driver’s licenses, and the working phone number of a psychiatrist. Anyone who comes home without them is voted off the island. Back to civilization.
The tribes could comb the wild swamplands of eastern New Orleans in search of buried treasure—perhaps the lettuce crisper from William Jefferson’s refrigerator—and whoever finds the wad of cash gets two nights’ immunity to blow it all on Bourbon Street.
I see great potential for a supporting role for our mayor, who could appear as some crazed tribal voodoo warrior who makes crazy gestures and says crazy things and then presents a challenge: Haul away the trash! Secure an equitable insurance settlement! Build a casino!
The winning tribe gets immunity. And a bar of chocolate.
The tribes could commandeer some boats from people’s driveways and sail out into Lake Pontchartrain to catch fish. Then, when they return, they could fight lawsuits against the boats’ owners.
When real looters break through the CBS security barricade and overrun the set, the tribes could all take cover in local bookstores—the only retail outlets looters never visit.
Then, in a surprise ending season finale that trumps anything the writers at 24 or The Wire could ever come up with, the four tribes—Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian—could discover a fifth tribe in their midst, a morally impoverished group suffering from an identity crisis greater than the sum of the other four.
There, living in rough brush in the shadow of Tad Gormley Stadium, an undisciplined and wild-eyed tribe lives off the cadavers of New Orleans, sucking the blood from any living being in its midst, a primitive and unruly tribe bereft of a code of conduct, decency, or civility for the past three decades.
In the season’s climactic moment, the New Orleans contestants could come face-to-face with the motley and desperate indigenous cannibal tribe that destroys its enemies without regard to race, color, or creed: the Entergy board of directors.
And because of their electric bills, all four Survivor tribes are forced to relocate to Houston to finish the game.