Welcome to Tribal Council, people. You’ll notice that the Tribal Torches are a bit different this year- in honour of us being in China, the props department built them out of illegal fireworks, so you might want to be very careful when you light them up to cast your- whooaa! Well, those of you who were going to vote Amanda out need not bother now- what a lucky coincidence that one of our contestants is a grave-digger! Okay, your next task for immunity is to find as many pieces of Amanda as you can before the Pandas get them and return them to me; Please don’t eat any, or you’ll spoil your appetite for the live rats and uncooked rice we’re going to have you abseil the Great Wall for later. And remember, if any of you see that bitch Phil Keoghan or any contestants from THE AMAZING RACE during any of our tasks, you get a $30,000 cash prize for taking that ratings-stealing, copycat mother****er out with your bare teeth. Off you go teams! Have fun risking life, limb and hygiene in the jungle challenge- I’ll be sitting here and challenging my literacy skills as we review our latest desert island castaway, SURVIVOR: CHINA (Saturdays, Nine- 7:30pm)
Y’all are probably familiar with the grand-daddy of all Reality TV shows, SURVIVOR, in which two teams of twelve American contestants (who seem so ignorant of their surroundings as to have be bred in some sealed bank vault and released specifically for this show), who are dumped (relatively) supply-less in the middle of some inhospitable terrain. There the two teams must ‘Outwit, Outstruggle and Outlast’ their environment, the other teams, the back-stabbing sneaky-types on their own teams and their own basic ineptitude (this last factor invariably weeds out more contestants than the challenges, in-fighting and anthrophagous wildlife combined). The show is now in its fifteenth season- an amusing little diversion is to compare blandly irksome host Jeff Probst’s appearance in a montage from season 1 onwards – is that Botox working to make him look more and more like SESAME STREET’s Guy Smiley each year?
This year the two teams are in the rural wilds of China- the first American TV show ever to be allowed to film there. Challenges for elimination this year *will* apparently involve the Tomb of the Terracotta Warriors- presumably teams will have to negotiate the crypt without incurring the wrath of the zombified, brain-hungry first Sovereign Emperor of China, and the Great Wall (during which soldiers from the Red Army will have standing instructions to take out any team member whom so much as damages a single brick). I don’t usually reveal spoilers in this column (note: It’s his childhood sled, the chick is a man, Kevin Spacey did it) but as we’re in the fifteenth season of SURVIVOR and you may not be tempted to watch otherwise, this year sees millions of reasons to watch the show’s traditional gay contestant- this time it’s 22-year old Gay Mormon flight attendant Tod Herzog do really, really well.
Outwit, Out-struggle and Outlast your common sense and tune in!
