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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: November 26, 2003
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Survivor, “The Great Lie” (Season 7, Episode 11). [Watch on CBS All Access]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Survivor: Pearl Islands may have been one of the all-time great misdirection seasons. If you were going by the TV commercials, you’d have been certain that Rupert, tie-dyed grizzly man of great bombast, was a shoo-in for the win, given how heavily the show was leaning on his star power. If you were going by the on-screen narrative, you’d have put your chips on someone like Andrew Savage, whose alpha-male dominance put hearts in Jeff Probst’s eyes. Skinny little cretin Johnny Fairplay was an annoyance. Foul-mouthed Sandra was on borrowed time.
Then, at the end of episode ten, the shocker: Rupert was voted out, due to a plot hatched by Johnny Fairplay, leaving Sandra twisting in the wind with barely any allies. And all of a sudden, the season that had started one way was about to hit the home stretch with two very different players facing off.
Sandra started the episode by delivering her most TV friendly moment: sneaking off to dump the tribe’s fish in retaliation for Rupert’s ouster. A petulant move, sure, but also one that announced that she was not about to surrender her game.
And then, at a reward challenge that saw the tribe’s loved ones show up to compete with them, Johnny Fairplay stepped into the realm of scummiest players of all time, hatching a pre-planned lie that his grandmother had died, in order to get some kind of sympathy-factor churning in his favor.
The best part of the challenge is that Sandra is the one player who could not give a fuuuuuck about Fairplay’s dead grandma. This challenge wasn’t about her. This was about the game. And Sandra came to win.
[You can watch “The Great Lie” on CBS All Access.]
Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.
