Closing the Book on 'Survivor'

In 1639, Newport, R.I., was founded by a group of religious refugees from Massachusetts led by William Coddington. The small village soon became one of the most flourishing seaports in colonial North America because of its excellent harbor. After the American Civil War, largely because of a temperate climate and scenic location, Newport developed as an opulent summer resort with palatial summer mansions.

Since this heyday of affluent vacationers, nothing much happened to Newport for many decades. All of that changed, however, when a man of epic proportions recently stepped from its ranks to reclaim the glory of the small seaside city on an island far away in the South China Sea. With the hubris of Oedipus, the resilience of Odysseus, the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the flamboyance of Liberace and the physique of Santa Claus, this Newport native and self-proclaimed "fat, naked fag" managed to outwit, outplay and outlast in life's ultimate challenge. His name: Richard Hatch. The game: Survivor. The official companion book: terrible.

This summer, the outlandishly successful television phenomenon known as Survivor captured the attention of an audience who did not want to watch reruns of Dawson's Creek having seen every episode during the school year and cannot understand how the contestants on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? know the answers to all those difficult questions.

That audience, of course, was me. Every Wednesday night, I would rush back to my Cambridge apartment, nuke a bag of popcorn, cuddle up on the couch and prepare for Survivor. Although some may consider a two-hour grace period between when my eyes were first glued to the television and when the opening credits for the show began to run to be a little excessive, I assure you the time was well-spent writing letters to CBS concerning how much Big Brother sucked.

Over the course of three months, America acquired 16 best friends in the forms of the castaways and one excellent target for long-range missile strikes in the form of host Jeff Probst. The castaways, drawn from a broad cross-section of society, connected with the audience on many levels. We all turned an eye inward on our own humanity while we fixed our eyes outward on the exploits of 16 strangers on an uninhabited island in the South China Sea. For instance, didn't the tribal decision to kick off Sonja, 63, and B.B., 64, early in the competition make you feel a little better about incessantly honking at that poor old man who took a couple seconds too long in the crosswalk? Didn't the wacky exploits of Brown graduate Greg convince you the liberal Ivy League university could use a core program that features mandatory classes on how not to be so goddamn annoying?

Didn't the alphabetic voting system of Sean, a neurosurgeon, legitimize the myth that pre-meds are great at memorizing 26 phonetic symbols, but they are not so good at making utterances that resemble coherent, logical statements? Didn't it make you feel a little guilty that, despite adorable Colleen's uncontested status as America's sweetheart, you couldn't help but have lustful dreams about her mud-wrestling Susan the truck driver? Finally, didn't you secretly hope that the episode featuring Richard's naked birthday extravaganza would simply last forever?

With Survivor, we did not only grow close to 16 televised strangers--we also grew closer to ourselves. When the final tribal council was over, and Richard was declared the survivor, I felt like a shadow of my former self. How else to regain the magic and splendor of the weekly reality-based show, I thought, than to relive my favorite moments all over again with the official companion book, Survivor: The Ultimate Game? Unfortunately, this text has only left me thirsting even more for the next season in the Australian Outback. The book, written by Executive Producer Mark Burnett and long-time adventure writer Martin Dugard, fails miserably to recapture the conflicts, competition and connivances that made the television series irresistible. Hastily written while Burnett was still on the island, it reads more like the overdramatic diary of a junior high school girl armed with a thesaurus and without any discretion on when to use it. At times, the hyperbole becomes downright nauseating: "Gretchen was crestfallen. All that hard work...that marksmanship...why, she could almost feel the red ripeness of the watermelon dribbling down her chin... Sometimes island living could be so unfair." Similar silly prose dominates the book, which is an easy read if you can keep from gouging your own eyes out. In addition, annoying quirks like referring to the first chapter as "Evolution One" and Probst as "Chief Jeff" challenge the patience of even the trashiest reader.

Survivor: The Ultimate Game does, however, provide viewers addicted to the series with some interesting facts not revealed during the show's 13-week stint. Everyone knew that Richard was gay, but so was Sonja, who was the first castaway voted off the island after Richard, originally the target of a secret Tagi alliance among the women, garnered sympathy after coming out. Pre-school teacher Gretchen, with an I.Q. of 142, was so beloved by the organizers that the crew came out of the bushes and hugged her when she was voted off. The organizers did not feel the same way about Greg, however, who worried how far he would go to disrupt the game. At one point, Greg stalked the camera crew and challenged Probst's council authority.

But the book fails to answer some of the biggest mysteries of tribal life in the South China Sea. What romance were Greg and Colleen covering for during their scandalous excursions? Why did Sean feel he owed Kelly a meal? Why did Sue feel such a harsh speech was necessary at the last council? These issues remain a mystery. For now, however, I plan to keep pining for the new Outback episodes, never to read another book on a television series again and to continue writing letters to Big Brother producers until they release poisonous pterodactyls into the house. Now that would be reality-based television.