For a moment, every other player stepped away from the game and unanimously voted Jeff out. Through tears, the group told Zeke how much he had come to mean to them they told Jeff that he had taken a step too far. The tribe, composed of both conservatively- and liberally-minded members, immediately turned on Jeff. Sitting at the infamous tribal council, a fellow player named Jeff leveraged Zeke’s identity against him, alleging that if Zeke could keep that a secret from the tribe, he could easily manipulate his way to the end. Not only did his tribe take the medical expulsion hard-my friend’s mom did, too.įox is the second openly trans player to be on Survivor the first was Zeke Smith, whose nationally-aired outing was a painful moment of education for Survivor fans. This season a contestant named Jackson Fox, a trans man from Houston, was pulled from the game due to a medical condition. I met up with a friend over drinks this past weekend and he was telling me about his somewhat conservative mom and her love of Survivor.
They, along with your nightly news, will tell you we have no common ground anymore.īut, I would argue, the real barometer of public opinion is playing out on primetime, and the findings there are that we're not so divided.
As legislation is deployed across the country that chips away at civil rights for women, LGBTQ+, and Black people, think pieces and reported features and in depth reporting are all over it.
(That went well, right?)Īnd while reality TV remains a good humorous antidote to the wars in our countries, as the number of shows and formats of casts have expanded, it’s also become a pretty good indicator of where we are as a society. We elected a reality TV star as president. In the fifteen years since that episode aired, the cultural climate on and off of reality television has shifted majorly.
Also, one of the first moments that I remember reality TV not taking itself seriously-or rather, as Galinka perfectly summarizes, “that some people have war in their countries.” A rare moment of self-awareness that winks to the fact that this apex of drama is not the most important thing happening right now, even if it is the most entertaining.