Television: We Like To Watch

You are not, to paraphrase Jay McInerney, the sort of person who would watch Survivor. It's not just the larvae-eating contest (which ex-Survivor B.B. Andersen, 64, helpfully describes as "like having a booger in your mouth"). It's the gladiatorial concept: stranding 16 people on a tropical island to scrabble for food and shelter, all for the delectation of sluggards licking Cheetos dust off their fingers in their air-conditioned living rooms. It's the Machiavellian twist: having the contestants vote one another off the island until there is a single million-dollar winner and 15 rejects. It's the suffering, the mean-spiritedness, the humiliation.

And that's why you are watching Survivor. And you, and you. More than 23 million of you, a phenomenal audience for summer-rerun season, watched last week as CBS's castaways reaffirmed our faith in human nature by kicking off the lawyer rather than the crotchety old guy. The first week the Pulau Tiga-based game show aired, ABC scheduled the virtually unbeatable Who Wants to Be a Millionaire against it. Survivor won in almost every audience category. The second week, Survivor won hands down. By the third week--when Regis Philbin, monochrome outfit in tatters, slunk away to lick his wounds, leaving Two Guys and a Girl and Norm to take his butt whuppin' for him--Survivor had ballooned into the biggest TV success since the last voyeur-vision landmark: Fox's gift to late-night comedians, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Which--we know, we know--you didn't watch.

Something strange is happening in television: the rise of VTV, voyeur television. Despite Survivor's gross-outs, its dark premise and its wall-to-wall cheesiness--the faux-Lion King sound track, the "tribal councils" held in what looks like a Holiday Inn Polynesian lounge circa 1963, the somber narration of Jeff Probst, former host of VH1's Rock 'n' Roll Jeopardy! and challenger to Regis for luckiest-man-in-America status--despite all this, viewers have embraced the desert-island soap with fascination and bemused contempt. Does Dirk have a crush on Kelly? Will Ramona throw up again? Kim Reed, 27, of Syracuse N.Y., who writes for the website mightybigtv.com watches it while on the phone with friends. "I cannot tear myself away," she says. "I have watched every season of The Real World, and it does not compare to the evilness of this show."

Sipping a Miller Lite at Harrys' of Arlington in Arlington Heights, Ill., and watching the third installment, Christopher Wojcik, 24, declares, "I think it's fixed, and I don't buy any of it." He has not, however, missed an episode. "That older guy that got killed off the show last week deserved it. You just don't wash your clothes in the fresh-water supply," he says, referring to the transgression that helped get Andersen the boot. (Note: Losers are not actually executed, but Fox hasn't worked up a knockoff series yet.) "Don't vote me off the island!" is rivaling "Is that your final answer?" as a red flag for water-cooler bores. And last week CBS announced a Survivor sequel, set in the Australian outback.