Fans of survival drama and underused hashtags jumped with joy today, after producers at DSTV and MNet announced their executive decision to set the next overhyped and underwatched season of Survivor South Africa “actually in South Africa.”
“We’ve been thinking about South Africa and the direction the show has been taking in the past few years, and we wanted to make Survivor into the most harsh, difficult and drama-filled show around,” said MNet CEO Ree Peatz. “At first we thought to maybe follow Bear Grylls and set the show somewhere bleak and depressing and very difficult to survive: like the endless desertscape of the Sahara, or the bleak and frozen ardour of the Artic Tundra, or even the Rhodes University Accounting 3 lecture venue – very few survive that place. But then we realised that actually we don't have to go halfway across the world to find such a depressing and difficult environment to put our contenders.”
It soon became clear to them that the best place to set a show that depicts surviving against all odds was actually South Africa.
“For many, many years now South Africa has slowly declined into a perfect environment to shoot a harsh and unforgiving reality show based on surviving against all odds,” said Peatz. “This will make the show more locally relevant, more bold and representative, and also save us a fortune on travel expenses and filming costs.”
The much-anticipated upcoming season, says Peatz, will be set in one of South Africa’s townships.
“In the past, our contenders basically took the equivalent of a three-week all-expenses paid vacation to a lovely tropical beach paradise in the Indian Isles. There, they were guaranteed at least two meals a day, a crude shelter that kept out most of the rain and bugs, clean drinking water, and free, world-class on-site medical attention if anything went wrong,” said Peatz, outlining the show’s shortcomings. “But here, closer to home, thousands of normal South Africans have none of those wonderful relaxations and privileges.”
The show will now have a set of more contemporary challenges and aims.
“They will have to contend with things like low pay, criminal working conditions, awful socioeconomic disparity, increasingly more frequent rising costs of living, widespread crime, an inefficient and overtaxed police service, no healthcare, endless strikes, terrible basic and secondary education, disease, malnutrition, unemployment,” said show organiser Ian Munity. “And in this new show, they won’t be set weekly challenges. We’ll just declare whoever is left alive by the end of the season as the winner. The symbolic act of snuffing out their torch will be replaced by the even more symbolic act of Digging A Hole And Lowering A Box Holding Their Lifeless Corpse Into It Before Burying It and Saying Some Prayers.”
Many South Africans have, however, voiced their displeasure at the decision saying they used to love the escapism and sense of wonderful relaxation the show brought.
“I used to escape my problems by watching a bunch of unknown ‘celebrities’ and douchebags argue on a beach over who said what to who while actually eating a proper meal and not facing the daily dreariness of everyday life in SA,” said one of the seven people who watch the show. “It was nice to be able to get away from it all, you know? To lose yourself in a world of clean water and only slightly shoddy houses, with so little tension between the various colour groups with actual meat to go on your rice. Now i'm going to have to watch real people dealing with real problems - what kind of a reality TV show is that?”
Media analysts now confirm that this is the biggest change of scenery for a reality television show, ever since MNet made the decision to cancel Judge Judy and other similar court dramas and put cameras in front of Oscar Pistorius.
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