Fight To The Finish On CBS
A new "reality adventure" show, Survivor will strand 16 Americans on an uninhabited island in the South China Sea and pit them against each other in a "rigorous contest of physical and mental endurance," the CBS Television Network said Thursday.
Their payoff? One million dollars.
CBS ordered 13 episodes to air next summer.
Contestants will be selected through a nationwide search. Then they will be placed on Pulau Tiga island off the Borneo coast for an expected six weeks of round-the-clock taping.
The contestants will have to forage for food and shelter, though outdoor specialists and medical teams will be available for emergencies, the network said.
At the end of each episode, the participants will cast secret ballots to expel "losers." Then, the last seven who were expelled choose the winner from the remaining two.
Survivor was promoted by its producer as putting only the players' egos at risk.
A Swedish version of the show, however, began with a dark incident: In the initial season of Expedition Robinson in 1997, the first contestant to be declared a loser committed suicide a month after returning home.
The network that airs the highly popular program in Sweden denied any responsibility, but the man's widow blamed the show then and still does. CBS said it believes the program was not a factor.
"There is no evidence to suggest a connection between the young man's tragedy and the show," CBS spokesman Chris Ender said Monday in Los Angeles.
Expedition Robinson, which airs on Swedish public broadcaster SVT, began filming June 1, 1997, in Malaysia, with Sinisa Savija the first one kicked out by his team.
"He became deeply depressed and agonized. He felt degraded as a person and didn't see any meaning with life," his widow, Nermina Savija, told the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet at the time. He worried about having to wait to see his failure on the air, she said.
"He was a glad and stable person when he went away, and when he came back he told me, 'They are going to cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool, only to show I was the worst, and that I was the one that had to go,'" Mrs. Savija said.
In a telephone interview Monday, she said her feelings about the show are unchanged.
"It's not a game when you choose ordinary people and put them under great pressure, constantly in front of the camera," she said from Norrkoping, Sweden, where Savija jumped in front of a train July 11, 1997.
Mrs. Savija appealed to SVT to pull the series after his death; instead, footage of Savija was largely edited out of the program.
"He was aware of the conditions," Pia Marquard, the then-head of SVT's entertainment division said in 1997. "When you enter something lke this you have to take some personal responsibility, too."
The board that monitors radio and television in Sweden concluded that Expedition Robinson did not subject contestants to bullying or psychological abuse.