It’s raining out in the jungle. You’ve been starving on this godforsaken island for nearly a month with the hopes of kicking everyone else off to win the million-dollar prize. You’re playing the reality TV game show Survivor. As the votes for the next loser are read aloud, you listen in horror. It’s you; after everything you’ve been through, the people you thought were your friends voted you out. You’re about to be banished from the game, forced to leave the island you’ve been living on for a month. As you bring up your torch to be extinguished, you hear the words “You’ve been voted off the island.” But not really.
“You’ve been voted off the island” is one of those super famous quotes that never really happened. It’s a sign of the sheer success of Survivor that they can enter the pantheon of “so popular even its misquotes are trivia” alongside Star Wars’ “Luke, I am your father.” The quote, however, strikes some truth; most precisely in how it nails the structure of competitive reality TV shows. Every episode, someone will leave the game, until ultimately a winner is crowned with the title of Sole Survivor and a 1 million dollar prize or, if you’re playing Deal or No Deal Island, a 13 million dollar prize.
This format was an instant hit. Survivor’s first season finale was the second most-watched episode of a show of the 2000s, beaten only by the series finale of Friends in 2004. This formula spread like wildfire. There was competitive reality based on anything you can think of. Big Brother was competitive reality in a house, The Amazing Race was the same for travel, there were countless food competitions and more. Some were good, but most were quite bad, failing to make it past a single season. The reason I’m giving this brief history lesson is to explain how genuinely shocking it is that Deal or No Deal Island is phenomenal.
This show should not exist, let alone work. A Survivor-esque game based on Deal or No Deal? No one was asking for this. Its questionable existence is not helped by its contrived execution either. The show tries to force a mystery, with the banker’s identity being kept secret and all the players feeling animosity towards them. The only problem is, I don’t think anyone cares about who the Deal or No Deal banker is, making the whole ‘plotpoint’ feel forced and corny (but I’m the one complaining about narrative structure in a Deal or No Deal spinoff, so I don’t think I get to judge).
The format of the show is also awful. The way the show decides who stays and who leaves is by having one person play a game of deal or no deal, and if they take a deal lower than their case value, they lose and are eliminated. If they make a deal higher than their case value, they get to choose who leaves. Once again, there’s only one major problem: deal or no deal is completely luck-based. Once someone goes up to ‘play the banker,’ as they call it, their ability to stay in the game is completely up to chance. Everything about the show, from its central idea to its mythology to its format, should have been left on the cutting room floor.
That’s exactly why Deal or No Deal Island is so interesting: nothing about it should work, but it’s really good. To understand exactly why it works, let’s take a look back at the golden age of reality television.
To crown a winner in Survivor, a collection of people previously voted out, the jury, votes on who they want to win. It was in this climactic moment in the first ever season of Survivor when Sue Hawk, a jury member, gave a speech that would soon be known as “snakes and rats.” In this speech, she tells one of the finalists, Kelly Wiglesworth, she was so betrayed by her that she would not help her if she found her dying of thirst. Even today, this speech is a shocking moment, contrasting morality with the competitive drive to win. The irony was, Richard Hatch, the other finalist mostly spared by Sue’s speech, was openly more deceitful than Wiglesworth, which helped him win. It was this combination of skulduggery and integrity that made early reality TV so entertaining and interesting.
As time went on, the people on these shows became more and more deceitful, creating some iconic and thrilling moments. Many of these moments revolve around one player promising another safety, as in not voting against them or nominating them for something potentially harmful, before immediately reneging on their deal. It’s these exact moments that cause people to become legends on their shows, leading to more and more people trying to emulate them to achieve the same status and redefining what can be accomplished in the game. As these legends come back again and again to play the game, more and more lore begins to surround the show, and some of the best moments come from the most iconic players outplaying one another. Strategy gets pushed to its limits, people reinvent how to play the game and the viewers get some incredible moments out of it. The tension of seeing a close vote decided by only a single betrayal can stand up to some of the best thrillers Hollywood has to offer.
All of this caused a mythos to develop around each show. Who their legends were, how gameplay was defined across eras, what makes someone worthy to win and more all morphed as people pushed each game to its limits.
However, throughout it all, these shows became exactly that: a game. Everyone knew they had to play strategically in order to win, and it became normalized. There was no longer a moral question in playing to deceive and betray people. The shows lost their sense of scale, instead of watching people battle and betray one another for a life-changing amount of money, it felt like watching people play a board game, which can certainly still be interesting, but it’s not the same. That X-factor that made reality television shocking and enthralling faded away.
Back to Deal or No Deal Island. Despite all of its random weird features, it still has this sense of scale. For one, the whole game is being played for over 10 million dollars. The sheer magnitude of that amount of money alone raises the intensity. It also brings in some legendary players from other reality TV shows, so far from Survivor, Australian Survivor and Big Brother. The presence of these players (besides being the only reason I tuned in in the first place) adds to the stakes of the game as they give familiar faces early on to root for or against.
But what really makes the show click is the lack of that built-in mythos. People still take the game personally– it’s still intertwined with the morals of the players. People get mad when they’re lied to, they fight over how each other play the game and they create this good vs evil dynamic.
This atmosphere creates the perfect setup for some iconic moments. There’s a scene where one of the former reality TV stars, Dr. Will from Big Brother, exploits a loophole in the rules, mocks the whole cast and then openly betrays someone who thought they were safe. While in other shows this scene would be recognized as merely gameplay, in Deal or No Deal Island, it works as a major disruption. It upsets established hierarchies and makes people call into question how he and everyone else are playing the game. Put simply, the context of the rest of the game elevates this moment from a game move to a shocking moment. And the same reasoning behind this one example extends across the whole show, which is how the most ridiculous concept for a TV show I have ever seen turned out to be fantastic.
Reality TV is not going anywhere. It may not be the heavy hitter that it was 20 years ago, but it’s definitely still drawing eyes. In fact, it may even be entering a bit of a renaissance period, with fresh new shows like Deal or No Deal Island, The Traitors and House of Villains becoming increasingly popular. These new shows are bringing a refreshing edge defying the stale gameplay of their legacy counterparts.
It’s not uncommon for people to refer to reality tv as ‘trash television.’ But, despite its reputation, reality shows often strike at the core of the human experience. Don’t get me wrong, that trash TV moniker at times is certainly earned. But the crux of what made reality shows so popular in the first place is the contrast between morals and chicanery. Reality TV can be funny, shocking and iconic within the span of just a few minutes, and what it lacks in a central artistic vision it makes up for through its simple creativity. It’s some of the best TV out there and I’m done pretending it’s not.
