What’s realer than real? Television. In the summer of 2000, Survivor: Borneo aired on CBS and quickly became the number one rated show on American primetime network television, averaging 25 million viewers per episode.1 The premise of the show was simple: 20 Americans would be divided into ‘tribes’ and abandoned in the wilderness with minimal supplies. They must compete in daily challenges to earn immunity and, failing to do so, all vulnerable players must decide on a person to vote off the island. At the end of the 39 days and after pitching their case to players they eliminated, one player would remain who had “outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted” them all. Within its first season, Survivor was a cultural phenomenon, paving the way for reality television to become a staple of our entertainment diet.
The genre promised one simple thing: regular people on the screen, doing irregular things, sometimes for a handsome chunk of change. Of course, it is generally accepted that the ‘reality’ in reality TV comes with a wink and a nod. Hours upon hours of footage are neatly packaged into season long character arcs and episodic character moments. I will refer to this as the concealment produced by the reality TV apparatus. What I mean by this is that the so-called reality we see on screen has been manipulated before the camera even gets switched on. There is a casting process, where casting directors hand-pick personalities that would be compelling to watch. These people are then placed into an inorganic situation where they are living with strangers, competing against them, and voting them out in order to win a million dollars: these are the parameters of the game. The camera further constructs this reality: it only records a certain amount of footage, from a certain perspective. This footage is cut together with In-The-Moments (ITMs), an interview to the camera where a contestant narrates the events unfolding in the game from their perspective. The advent of the genre finds its roots in sensationalizing documentary, with the focus of the program being to capture life as it is. As such, interviews to camera became a convention of the reality TV genre as well, the confessional serving as a testimonial to the footage of cinema verité variety.2 Finally, when it is all cut together, the show emerges, ready to be projected onto the screen and to meet the viewer. This final edit serves as a narrative interface, allowing for the audience to engage with and ‘read’ the show.
Fan response forms a crucial dimension of reality TV as a genre. In the contemporary landscape, fans view engaging with the ecosystem of media around a reality TV show as much a part of the entertainment as the show itself. In his book, The Work of Being Watched, media studies scholar Mark Andrejevic writes that reality TV offered “a way to participate in a medium that has long relegated audience members to the role of passive spectators.”3 Andrejevic is referring here to the promise that a viewer could one day be a contestant—that the reality of the show is permeable to our personal reality. However, the interactivity built into reality TV moves beyond that; the genre elicits fan groups and social engagements. The fanaticism for reality TV is not just for the shows themselves but the culture it produces in its audiences. Fans will create fantasy drafts and hold viewing parties, ask strangers at parties who they’re rooting for, post memorable frames on social media, and even vote for their favorites to win.4 For competition reality shows like Survivor, this engagement often centers on trying to figure out who the winner of a season will be. Reading forums like Reddit and conversations on the site formerly known as Twitter, it’s clear that these predictions aren’t based solely on who the audience is rooting for, but rather a close reading and understanding of the reality TV apparatus. The audience understands that the concealment the edit allows is only partial: the game narrative on the show must play out like it did at the time of filming. While producers can ask leading questions to shape narratives, the winner of a challenge will be the same in an edit as it was at the time of filming. Ultimately, there is only one way the story of the competition can turn out. Viewers watch closely for the winner edit.
To tell its story successfully, a show must produce compelling characters—the heroes, the villains, the comic relief—to carry forward the narrative. Specifically in the subgenre of competition reality TV, the edit must take a complex social dynamic with independently acting contestants and turn them into characters. It must, ideally, raise the winner as the protagonist, who rightly deserves the prize and title. To accomplish this, the audience must be sympathetic to the character, understand the choices they make, and hear the story from their perspective while remaining invested in the show from week to week, meaning it cannot be too obvious. The edit produces red herrings, anti-heroes, and underdogs, rendering multi-dimensional people into character archetypes that are legible to the audience.
The subreddit r/Edgic is a community that watches for this sleight of hand, approaching the edit as an interface to be read. The term “edgic”, a portmanteau of edit and logic, was coined to read the edit of Survivor and predict a winner, particularly through counting how many confessionals a character receives. Usually framed as a medium shot, the confessional allows a contestant to break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience. The confessional is a convention of the genre and underscores the interactivity at the heart of reality TV. The show knows there is an audience watching, and they want to speak to them directly. Further, the confessional serves as a way for the audience to establish a bond with the character we are hearing from the most often. When writing about the close up on the face in found-footage cinema, Allan Cameron says, “Whereas landscapes and streets are all too readily interpretable as ‘empty spaces’, the presence of the face provides assurance that we are looking at a potential object of dramatic interest—the face occupies the frame, in other words, and authorizes it in the process.”5 Extrapolating from this logic, a confessional grants the contestant speaking to us authorial control over the larger story of the season. We understand their motivations and responses to each move made, making the audience sympathetic to their story. With this in mind, users of the subreddit r/Edgic believe that by counting the number of confessionals a character gets, and what that confessional says about them as a character, the audience will be able to gauge whose story we are following.
With each episode, the chart measures how visible a contestant is (on a scale of 1-5), the tone of their visibility (super-negative to super-positive), and the complexity of the character (irrelevant to over-the-top). For example, on the most recent completed season of the show, Survivor 45, viewers quickly marked player Hannah Rose as “OTTN5” in the first episode—meaning she was over-the-top, in a negative light, and extremely visible. Hannah spent the first episode of the show experiencing nicotine withdrawals and ultimately quit the show by the end of the episode. Her storyline only needed to sustain itself for the length of the premiere therefore she doesn’t need to be portrayed as a complex character for the purposes of the show. The ideal winner should be visible from the beginning of the show, on the audience’s radar. In contrast to Hannah, the eventual winner of the season, Dee Valladares, is noted as “MOR2”: middle of the road, neither positive or negative, not invisible but not obvious. If a contestant is extremely visible but over-the-top in the first act of the season, they are not likely to be a winner pick since this characterization lacks complexity. In Survivor 45, this is exemplified by musician Sifu Alsup, who was often portrayed as an over-the-top eccentric rubbing people around him the wrong way. We as an audience never get to know him beyond the quirks and as a result don’t root for him. A character like this may be a main character of shorter story arc that keeps viewers engaged. However, if a contestant is given several confessionals despite not being a main character in these shorter-term story arcs, their edit is read as more positive. They might just be recounting the events of the previous episode or giving their opinion on other cast members, but this establishes the perspective of the game the audience shares, making us more sympathetic towards them.
The producers of the show are aware of this mode of engagement with the edit, but don’t see eye-to-eye with this interpretation. In an interview with Survivor recap podcast, Drop Your Buffs, the executive producer of Australian Survivor, David Forster called the Edgic nothing but a fun metric. According to him, the number of confessionals someone receives is also contingent on how effective and engaging they are as a storyteller. “Let’s say there is a story that involves five or six people in the tribe, you know, it’s a vote that’s a cobbled together alliance of five or six of them—the person who’s best at telling the story will end up telling it in the edit.”6 He continues on saying that a true winner’s edit, from the producer’s perspective, is one that explains to the audience why it is that this player won without giving it away from the jump. “Of course,” Forster emphasizes, “we’re just working with what we’re given, the content.”7 Despite the confessional count not being a direct metric in determining who wins the game, it does help the audience understand the game from that player’s perspective. His comments highlight that the story ultimately must be about the winner’s journey, as articulated for an audience. In other words, the players and the edit must convince the audience. By speaking to camera, a player can establish a rapport with the audience and show them the game as they see it. For a winner edit to feel justified, the audience needs to be in on a player’s perspective as to why the moves they make are logical and optimal.
Reality TV, in the way the entire apparatus is constructed, is acutely aware of its audience. As Andrejevic puts it, “the promise of reality television is not the promise of unmediated reality so much as it is the promise of access to the reality of mediation.”8 From this perspective, as much as the edit is a concealment of elements of the game or show, it reveals the mediation. In other words, the work that an edit does to obscure certain facets of the game, perhaps because they are boring or don’t serve the narrative, in turn highlights the elements that do serve a particular story. The tallying of confessionals and character moments on r/Edgic outlines what these stories are. Within this subgenre, thinking of the edit as a narrative interface allows us to think about the symbiotic relationship between the audience and the show.
While the edit of a scripted television show may take the audience into account in their editing decisions, it is in the sense of whether or not a scene or storyline might be successful. Scripted television imagines the audience as its receptacle. However, for the purposes of competition reality TV, where the story must not only entertain but convince in order maintain the viewer’s faith in the fairness, or reality, of the game, the audience is spoken to directly. They are implicated within the reality TV apparatus and asked to meet the show’s narrative on screen through the edit. For shows like Survivor, in particular, that often brings back players for a second season and has an extensive commentary/review ecosystem, the interaction at the edit interface determines the future of contestants and the success of the show. If a character’s edit is well received, they are more likely to be brought back. Note here that the character must not necessarily be well-liked but rather recognized as a significant contributor to the dynamic of a season. A favorable read of the edit interface might endear the contestant to the audience, further feeding back into their life cycle as a character of the show, if not on TV then in the show’s adjacent spheres (i.e. social media, fan memory, and trusted commentators.) The stars of reality TV and those that go on to make a career out of responding to it are not made purely within the show’s edit but rather in what happens when the audience interacts with the edit.
: :
Endnotes
- Annette Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), 3.
- Susan Murray, “‘I Think We Need a New Name for It’: The Meeting of Reality TV and Documentary,” in Reality TV : Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Oulette, 2nd ed., 1 online resource (ix, 377 pages) : illustrations vols. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 65–81, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.08301, 67.
- Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Oxford, United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 2.
- Danielle Lindemann, True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Girroux, 2022), 10-11.
- Allan Cameron, “Face, Frame, Fragment: Refiguring Space in Found-Footage Cinema,” in Screen Space Reconfigured (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, n.d.), 127.
- Ricard Foye and Sean Evans, “Interview: Australian Survivor Executive Producer David Forster,” Drop Your Buffs: A Survivor Podcast, accessed March 31, 2023, https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fXjNqDxmPZpMhl2e5RHq3?si=a8c9ff3058e0465b.
- Foye and Evans.
- Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, 215.
Prabhnoor Kaur