Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe

Author:Patrick Radden Keefe [Keefe, Patrick Radden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593607800
Google: L11FEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0593607805
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

WINNING

How Mark Burnett resurrected Donald Trump as an icon of American success. (2019)

EXPEDITION ROBINSON, A SWEDISH reality-television program, premiered in the summer of 1997 with a tantalizing premise: sixteen strangers are deposited on a small island off the coast of Malaysia and forced to fend for themselves. To survive, they must cooperate, but they are also competing: each week, a member of the ensemble is voted off the island, and the final contestant wins a grand prize. The show’s title alluded to both Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, but a more apt literary reference might have been Lord of the Flies. The first contestant who was kicked off was a young man named Sinisa Savija. Upon returning to Sweden, he was morose, complaining to his wife that the show’s editors would “cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool.” Nine weeks before the show aired, he stepped in front of a speeding train and killed himself.

The producers dealt with this tragedy by suggesting that Savija’s turmoil was unrelated to the series—and by editing him virtually out of the show. Even so, there was a backlash, with one critic asserting that a program based on such merciless competition was “fascist television.” But everyone watched the show anyway, and Savija was soon forgotten. “We had never seen anything like it,” Svante Stockselius, the chief of the network that produced the program, told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. Expedition: Robinson offered a potent cocktail of repulsion and attraction. You felt embarrassed watching it, Stockselius said, and yet “you couldn’t stop.”

In 1998, a thirty-eight-year-old former British paratrooper named Mark Burnett was living in Los Angeles, producing television. Lord of the Flies was one of his favorite books, and after he heard about Expedition: Robinson, he secured the rights to make an American version. Burnett had previously worked in sales and had a knack for branding. He renamed the show Survivor.

The first season was set in Borneo, and from the moment it aired on CBS in 2000, Survivor was a ratings juggernaut: according to the network, 125 million Americans—more than a third of the population—tuned in for some portion of the season finale. The catchphrase delivered by the host, Jeff Probst, at the end of each elimination ceremony, “The tribe has spoken,” entered the lexicon.

Burnett had been a marginal figure in Hollywood, but after this triumph he, too, was rebranded, as an oracle of spectacle. Les Moonves, then the chairman of CBS Television, arranged for the delivery of a token of thanks—a champagne-colored Mercedes. To Burnett, the meaning of this gesture was unmistakable: “I had arrived.” The only question was what he might do next. A few years later, Burnett was in Brazil, filming Survivor: The Amazon. His second marriage was falling apart, and he was staying in a corporate apartment with a girlfriend. One day, they were watching TV and happened across a BBC documentary series called Trouble at the Top, about the corporate rat race.

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