Thu, August 24, 2006
The Race War Will Be Televised—12:14 PM
All I can say is, God bless Mark Burnett.
I can't believe it's taken this long for something to bump that stupid mirror glasses post off the top of the page. When I posted it, I thought, "Surely I'll watch and review Vanished tonight, and then this will be forgotten." Later that evening, I realized I was way too exhausted from the thorough ass-kicking my circadian rhythms took over the weekend. Plus, tradition is a good thing. ATGoNFP posts come on Mondays, dammit! X=Q, forever! Don't mess with success!
Then I thought surely I'd have a column ready about my high school reunion last weekend. Or I'd write a review of Walk the Line – but all I could think of was "Reese Witherspoon: most deserved Academy Award in at least a decade." I was beginning to think my idiotic remarks about the nature of refraction would just keep on dominating the home page forever.
But then, along came Burnett and his undead army of twist-wielding zombies. They've announced that this coming season of Survivor will begin with the contestants separated by ethnicity. White, black, asian, and hispanic. This is great for at least a dozen reasons. The "separate but equal" fresh water pits; the added undercurrent of racism in the post-merge cliques; the lopsided performance on challenges involving puzzles, eating weird things, or swimming. But, most importantly, it's fantastic because it means that fewer than 14 of the 16 contestants will be white this time. What a boon for diversity!
According to the Survivor producers, the lack of diversity on previous seasons has not been a casting bias as much as a cultural divide. Only whitey is stupid enough to want to be on the show (a problem not faced by the producers of Flavor of Love). According to the statement, about 4 out of 5 audition videos are from white people. (And 4 out of those 4 feature poorly edited "skits" featuring nudity, face paint, and rustling around in the woods.) So, presumably they've had to save up these 12 non-white contestants until they had enough to do this type of season.
I did a little dance about Burnett and his minions actually listening to criticism of the show, and then I got to the paragraph about how their bringing back the disastrous "exile island" feature, and I wanted to cut my own face off.
