That was the paradox of the first season of Survivor: CBS had launched a wildly ambitious, masterfully structured television show, one that would elevate the scrappy, low-fi reality genre into something more like a slick, hypnotic blockbuster movie. They were inventing new production techniques on the fly—ways to gamify personal relationships, to turn real life into plot points, to make suffering beautiful. But the Survivor production was simultaneously understaffed and underbudgeted, full of people who were literally starving in both the cast and the crew. It was a brutal work environment
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