What ‘Survivor’ Taught America About Truth and Power

O n a hot March day in 2000, 16 ordinary Americans arrived on the beaches of Borneo to participate in a grand new experiment: a television show called Survivor. Reality competition was still new, and no one — not even the show’s top brass — knew exactly what they were making or how the next 39 days would play out. But one contestant seemed certain of how it would end. “I’ve got the million-dollar check written already. I mean, I’m the winner,” Richard Hatch told the camera in his first “confessional” interview. He was playing up his confidence, performing a cheeky swagger.

He also was right: Hatch won the first season of Survivor. And with that win, he wrote the first playbook. On Survivor you could perform — play a more ruthless, more cutthroat, heightened version of yourself — and if that persona told the most compelling story, not necessarily the truest, you could win. Even now, with Survivor’s landmark 50th season coming to an end, that playbook can still be seen in the game. But it can also be felt beyond it, in the political culture of this country — one in which ruthlessness and fraudulent fear-mongering can outperform decency and truth in the fight for power. 

As early as the casting process, Hatch understood he had to entertain. “I wasn’t just me; I was me beyond, me on steroids,” he told me 25 years later, while I was reporting my book, Survivor Legends, which came out this month. In one of his final interviews to get on the show, Hatch walked into a conference room with Executive Producer Mark Burnett and other CBS executives, but he didn’t sit down. “I put my hand on the chair and I said, ‘Listen, you know you’re gonna pick me. What you don’t know is I’m gonna win.’” He walked out to them laughing. Casting director Lynne Spillman remembers seeing Hatch sitting in the lobby taking notes on the other potential contestants. She didn’t understand what he was doing at the time, but now she does: “He was already playing Survivor.”

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Hatch brought this heightened self — witty, confident, perspicacious — to the game, and was ready to play hard to win the $1 million prize. The game’s rules were clear to him: outwit, outplay, outlast. Do what it takes to win. He created the first alliance — a strategy that is now core to the game — to gain numerical power, sewed seeds of distrust among friends so they would turn on each other, and made false promises to shape the game in his favor. These strategies are par for the course to modern Survivor viewers, but at the time they were shocking. 

Other castaways struggled with how to present themselves on screen while playing this game of cons and elimination. Colleen Haskell, a girl-next-door college student who parlayed her popularity into a short-lived acting career, was appalled: “They’re outright lying on national television! . . . Is a deserving person going to win this money? The answer to that question is no,” she said in a confessional. Kelly Wigglesworth, a 22-year-old rafting instructor, was in Hatch’s alliance, but struggled with her role. “How do you stay true to yourself and maintain integrity and still play this game?” she asked in that first season. 

In a later episode, she came around: “We’re not bad people. We just play them on TV.” Little did she know at the time how far the consequences of that understanding would reach. 

To Hatch, there was never a dilemma. “A football player doesn’t tap his opponent on his shoulder and say, ‘Hey, I’m about to tackle you,’” he tells me. “He fucking plows him.” 

This was the moral innovation of Survivor: it asked ordinary people to play themselves on television, in a game that required them to behave in ways they might reject in ordinary life. Ruthlessness could be understood as performance. Lying was “gameplay,” justified for the win. The island contained the game. The logic proved harder to contain.

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At the finale, Hatch and Wigglesworth each made their case to the jury of players they had eliminated. Wigglesworth asked to be judged by who she was. Hatch said it was the better player, not the better person, who should win. In one of the most iconic speeches in reality TV history, Wisconsin truck driver, Sue Hawk — once an ally, later betrayed — compared Hatch and Wigglesworth to the two things that filled their island home: snakes and rats. With torchlight flickering in her eyes, she said Hatch was a snake who knowingly went after his prey and Wigglesworth, a rat who scurried around fecklessly. “I feel we owe it to the island’s spirit…to let it be, in the end, the way Mother Nature intended it to be: for the Snake to eat the Rat.” More than 51 million Americans tuned in as she placed the deciding vote for Richard Hatch. This inaugural jury set a new precedent: snakes would win Survivor. 

Just off camera, Mark Burnett watched, too, taking in this moment that would become a launchpad to his illustrious career in reality television. 

When the season aired, Hatch expected to be celebrated for the smart, genre-defining game he played. “Wow, how wrong was I?” he says now. He became America’s first reality TV villain, chastised by press and public alike as evil and manipulative. (“‘Machiavellian’ I didn’t really mind,” he says.) Viewers scorned this rupturing of the facade of decency they expected. Hatch was treated as a moral offender (perhaps exacerbated by the fact he was openly gay, atheist, and often nude throughout the show). But over the next 49 seasons, the audience’s acceptance and ultimate celebration of “villainous” behavior would reflect how vastly and how quickly those societal norms shifted.

These changes can be seen most clearly through straight, white men, who didn’t have to contend with additional expectations placed on them. In Season Two, production was eager for a hero viewers would root for. Their answer came in the form of Colby Donaldson, the Texan mama’s boy who performed rugged gentlemanliness. He was dubbed the “All-American Hero,” and a new archetype was minted. By Season Four, “Boston Rob” Mariano warmed audiences to the anti-hero by placing his fear-based strategy in a context Sopranos-era audiences understood well: the mob boss. Dubbed “the Robfather,” he gave musing monologues in his slow, Boston drawl, narrating his desire to keep allies who wouldn’t question him or who would fear turning on him. In Season Seven, Jonny Fairplay came to Survivor from the world of wrestling. He became the heel — the arrogant antagonist — anticipating his villainous reception with a wink. During one challenge, he told his competitors he got news of his grandmother passing away. They let him win the reward. “My grandmother’s sitting at home watching Jerry Springer right now,” he told the cameras later with a sly smile. It was a shocking lie — one that went beyond the confines of the game— that reality TV viewers had never yet seen.

Still in the early years of reality television, contestants were starting to understand that by separating their true selves from their performed selves they could have more freedom to become bolder, more entertaining characters, or more heartless strategic tacticians. 

By the end of the aughts, Survivor’s 19th and 20th seasons introduced viewers to a player willing to take this logic to its limits: Russell Hantz. On his first night at camp, Hantz told his fellow castaways the tragic story of how his beloved German Shepherd, Rocky, drowned during Hurricane Katrina while he, as a firefighter, was trying to help his neighbors. Later, in a confessional, he admitted there wasn’t a shred of truth to the story. “I never lived in New Orleans. I’m not a fireman. I’ve never even had a German Shepherd. It’s crazy how you can break their hearts by telling them a lie,” he said.  Hantz was there to prove “how easy it is to win this game” if you make it “as miserable as possible.” That same night, he dumped water out of his tribemates’ canteens and burned their socks. “If I can control how they feel, I can control how they think,” he said. 

This misery-making helped Hantz brute-force his way to two successive finales. He lost both times. The jury wouldn’t reward this behavior. But production was smitten by this boundary-breaking gameplay. In Season 19, he had 108 confessionals, compared to just 15 for the season’s eventual winner, Natalie White. The result: Russell won the audience “Fan Favorite” vote both seasons, beating out returning favorites like Donaldson and Mariano on the Heroes vs Villains-themed 20th season. That split was revealing: the juries of his peers that refused to support the cruelty they personally experienced, and the audience at home that cheered him on, entertained and infatuated. Hantz was turning callousness into spectacle and many viewers were hungry for it. Barely a decade after Hatch faced widespread wrath for his relatively tame antics, Hantz was celebrated. 

Tony Vlachos became one of the most successful players ever, winning seasons 28 and 40, by figuring out how to toggle between the manipulation and authenticity. He studied the seasons before his and understood that “the one thing the greatest players on the show had in common was lies. Lies, lies, and more lies.” Deceit, Vlachos told me, was a difficult but necessary tool. “It’s very difficult for a genuinely good person to look someone in the eyes and promise them something they know isn’t true,” he said. ”To be able to shut all that down and go against your natural being is usually the difference between losing and winning this game.” Vlachos was a funny and generous player, helpful around camp. His genius was not simply that he lied — hiding his job as a cop, making alliances he didn’t intend on keeping, even falsely swearing on his father’s grave — it was that he knew where the lie ended. 

Vlachos succeeded where Hantz failed because “the relationships [with the other castaways] were real,” Vlachos said, and he knew when to be his authentic and genuinely kind self. For him, the game, his performance, had a clear boundary. But not everyone has that sort of discipline, with this playbook for power and attention suddenly so clear.

As reality TV grew and social media meant everyone became a performer of their own, the line between true self and performed self has eroded, and with it, the expectations of truth and decency. Digital life has become an arena where the best told story can beat the truest one.

After years of hustling, Survivor’s booming popularity turned Executive Producer Mark Burnett into a champion of the genre. He produced The Voice, Shark Tank, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader. His search for a host for The Apprentice led him to the brash, tabloid-friendly and financially flailing New York real estate tycoon, Donald Trump. Burnett offered Trump a job and something more: the opportunity to perform himself as successful and decisive. It was a chance for Trump to escape his failures, a weekly platform to develop this new, powerful character. As that performance grew, and eventually sought real power, the rules of the game were already established: the better player, not the better person, wins.  Lies and ruthlessness were acceptable in pursuit of the ultimate win. 

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Twenty-five years after Hatch’s win, Survivor’s 49th finale was interrupted: Trump, now president, was delivering a primetime address. He spoke of a country being “invaded” by millions of migrants coming out of “prisons and jails and mental institutions,” with the worst inflation “in the history of our country.” Then he boasted that he had fixed these problems, creating more positive change than any “administration in American history.” The truth — reality — seemed to matter less than selling his success convincingly. An hour later, the season’s finalists on Fiji made their own case to the jury, propagandizing their games, presenting a narrative a majority of voters would accept. The logic Burnett saw on that Borneo evening of the first finale in 2000 now defined his most consequential performer. (Trump has since returned the favor, having named his “special, special friend,” Burnett Special Envoy to the U.K. in 2024.)

“I played the game with full awareness it was a game,” Richard Hatch tells me now. “The game is an interesting look at what people do, how we can be, and how we pursue winning.” But he never saw that power-building strategy extending beyond the island like it has. “I couldn’t imagine people would live their real lives that way,” he adds, speaking directly of Burnett and Trump. “I guess I was ridiculously naive.”