SWAPPING GOATS FOR Snakes Australian Survivor, Narrative Complexity and Audience Expectations

I have been a diehard fan of US television franchise Survivor since its first season, released nearly eighteen years ago, when Richard Hatch graced the beaches of Borneo completely naked. During the television run of Network Ten’s 2016 reboot of Australian Survivor, however, I became curious as to why this local adaptation wasn’t an enjoyable experience. Was it the casting? Was it just bad luck that most of the contestants who were avid Survivor fans were voted out early? With, at one stage, there being three episodes airing weekly, was it just too much of a good thing? To answer these initial questions, I turn to Doris Baltruschat’s work on media ecologies, particularly her analysis of the localisation of Pop Idol for a Canadian audience.

Australian Survivor is a localised adaptation of the eponymous long-running American reality-television franchise. Such localisations are a result of international collaborations between production companies and local media ecologies, which consist of media and cultural agents ‘linked through their use of specific production technologies – co-production, format franchising and interactive media’. The Australian television industry is dominated by format producers, such as the local subsidiaries of Endemol Shine and FremantleMedia, and it is through this type of commercial negotiation that an international format can be adapted for the Australian cultural landscape.

Screening on Channel Ten in the prime-time slots of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings, Australian Survivor faces the challenge of quenching the thirst of fans of the original series, such as myself, without alienating a wider viewership who may be unfamiliar with the strategic complexities of the format. This, I argue, is the key difficulty in adapting an international title for a local media ecology. To explore the challenges inherent in format franchising, this essay will first outline how the US version of Survivor demonstrates narrative complexity. Second, it will look at how the Australian production’s 2016 season was a difficult marriage between textual elements of the original franchise and the demands of Australia’s media ecology. This difficulty in reconciliation resulted in Australian Survivor having to cater for both the fans of the American series and casual viewers newer to the franchise. Ultimately, I argue that narrative complexity is lost when a show has to alter its format for new fans.

The Survivor format

Survivor first premiered in the US in 2000, and has recently wrapped up its thirty-fifth season. An adaptation of the Swedish series Expedition Robinson, it was created by Charlie Parsons, an executive producer on the show alongside Mark Burnett and host Jeff Probst. Each season, a group of sixteen to twenty contestants is stranded