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What are your favorite seasons?
Marjorie: Africa was not my favorite season. That one didn't work very well for me.
Michael: I liked season 2, but I think that because of the fact that that was the first time I was fully into it all the way. Plus, pre-The View, I though that Elizabeth Filarski was rather hot.
Marjorie: I think that the first season was probably one of the best. The players were the best, the tribal council was the best.
Michael: It was the grittiest, too. I think at that point they just got people who would go along with it, which was probably hard to find, whereas now there are lots of beauty queens and buff guys. I mean, take a look at this season. There were a lot people there who could be or are models. I think that on a lot of these reality show now there are more people who are looking for acting or performance type venues. Jonathan Penner...they called him a writer probably because when he was writing his application he was writing, but he's actually been in movies. In fact, we found one that was not too flattering for him.
Where does last season rank on the scale?
Marjorie: I would say that it's probably number two in my book. I would say the first season is my favorite because of the newness of it. Though this season, between the strategy, the teamwork, the different alliances all around...I would say it's number two.
Michael: I say it would be in the top three or four for me, mainly for two reasons. First of all, as far as I'm concerned, Ozzy was the best physical player we've ever seen. Period. And, I would argue, Yul is one of the best leaders, one of the most social, mental players ever. People would argue with me about that, but I think he did something we've never seen in
Survivor before and that is, as I said earlier,
Survivor tends to bring out the less virtuous properties of people and Yul, for the first time, was not only able to be virtuous, but led a team of people to virtue. Yul truly did not fly under the radar, by any stretch of the imagination, but kept the virtue.
Marjorie: I also think that this season had a lot of twists to it. They started out with the whole race thing which, right or wrong, it got more ratings in. They always push the envelope a little bit and i think they did it well this time.
Michael: I'm disappointed with the companies who were sponsoring that pulled out because the word "race" was mentioned. In the end, if they were to take a look at what we ended up with a nice tribute to the fact that we should celebrate our differences rather than be racially divided. I'd like to see what the bigwigs or what the advertising weenies at GM and other companies that pulled out because of this are saying. I think they were really expecting some sort of OJ verdict trial coming out of this. It wasn't that.
It really, in all the cases, except maybe the white people because they were pretty stupid in this one, showed you some endearing qualities of all the different races and, as it turned out, the Asians and the Mexicans won and I think that shows goodness.
You know, I didn't see one thing on this
Survivor that was a racial slur. In fact, the biggest racial slurs came from the races themselves, like Cao Boi talking about being uncomfortable around other Asians. But, I didn't see anyone else, any overtones that were bad. I think, for once, it allowed people to dialogue about race.
A lot of people like to go with the "Oh, I'm colorblind" excuse. Well, that's nice, except for the fact that it's not real. Why don't we dialogue about it and start to understand each other so we can live together, as opposed to pretending, putting on our rose-colored glasses and pretending it doesn't exist? Because that's bullshit.
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Over the past few months, BuddyTV has interviewed a number of different people from all over the television industry. Thus far, we've featured an interview with CariDee English (winner of America's Next Top Model),an interview with Josh Schwartz (creator of The OC), an interview with Alfred Gough (creator of Smallville), an interview with John Shiban (executive producer of Supernatural), an interview with Mark Schwahn (creator of One Tree Hill) an interview with Hank Steinberg (creator of The Nine), an interview with David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik (the creators of The Class), and an interview with David S. Rosenthal (new Head Writer/Executive Producer of Gilmore Girls).