Quest For Fire On <i>Survivor 2</i>
The tribe has spoken for the first time on the premiere episode of Survivor: The Australian Outback (informally called Survivor 2). As CBS News Correspondent Manuel Gallegus reports, one unlucky person has been booted out of the outback.
About half way through the first Survivor episode, you could tell things weren't going well for Debb.
From day one, the 45-year-old Kucha tribe member didn't seem to fit in with her younger, more free-spirited tribe mates -- particularly Kimmie, the bartender from New York. They just did not get along.
Kimmie complained that Debb was too independent.
One night the Kucha tribe stayed-up late discussing sex, and Debb wasn't into it. Her prudish trepidation cost her a million dollars.
Survivor's host Jeff Probst says it's a familiar trap.
"You end up talking politics, religion, sex -- dividing line! All of a sudden, you're on the wrong side. Your torch is out and you didn't do anything."
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Physically Debb Eaton, was up to the challenge.
Before the show, she was a guard at a men's prison in New Hampshire.
When she told the inmates she filled out an application for Survivor, they laughed at her.
"They said, 'Are you crazy? How are you ever going to get along with those 16 people,'" she recalled. "I looked at them and said, 'How do you think I get along with you?'"
But getting along with inmates was apparently easier for Debb than with her tribe mates.
The sixteen scheming strangers were disgorged from a military cargo plane into an isolated, snake-infested patch of land in northeastern Australia.
Debb's team, the Kucha tribe, badly lost an immunity challenge to their opponents, the Ogakor tribe. Both teams had to cross three portions of a river carrying a torch to light a bonfire.
No one ate rats, like in the first game, but the second Survivor had its own gross-out factor: One contestant bit into a fig and quickly spit it out after finding it was infested with bugs.
The game was a television phenomenon last summer, with 51 million people watching on Aug23 as Richard Hatch outlasted his fellow contestants to win a $1 million prize.
Since the Super Bowl is annually TV's most-watched event, with more than 130 million people seeing all or part of last year's game, CBS had a chance for its biggest Survivor audience yet.
Following the post-Super Bowl sendoff, Survivor will settle in to a regular time slot on Thursdays at 8 p.m.
The next three months will tell whether new contestants Keith Famie, Kimmi Kappenberg or Maralyn Hershey or others can become household names like Hatch, the cantankerous Rudy Boesch or the blunt Susan Hawk.
More than 49,000 people applied to be on the second Survivor. The large selection has made for a more photogenic crew than the first group, where 6,000 people applied.
An Internet bookmaker, Intertops.com, has already posted odds on who will be the final Survivor this time, even though nothing is known about the contestants beyond brief biographies and pictures.
Famie, a 40-year-old chef from West Bloomfield, Mich., was listed as the favorite at 4-to-1 odds. Colby Donaldson, 26, an auto customizer living in Dallas, and Amber Brkich, 22, an administrative assistant from Beaver, Pa., were each given 5-to-1 odds.
CBS has again gone to extraordinary lengths to keep results of the game, which has already been completed and filmed, a secret. Be skeptical of any false leads before the final episode; Burnett pointedly ducked the question when asked if he was behind any false leaks last summer.
"We had great fun with it," he said. "And I think it's a game like Survivor is a game and it's all in good taste and good fun. As long as the audience is having a great experience each week, that's our job."
Ousted tribe member Debb will be on the CBS Early Show Monday morning.
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