Hartley Jafine

We imagine ourselves playing the game and we think to ourselves, if I was in this position, what would I do?

Now we as viewers at home have a lot more information than the players do.

And I think part of the joy of watching it is trying to imagine what it would be like if you were in those situations, how you would play the game and how you would handle the stresses and the elements of the environment of Survivor.

I feel like as a show, the concept revolutionized television.

No one had ever seen a show that had this documentary style, this voyeurism, but also be a competition-based show where players are voting each other out.

We had shows like The Real World where it was a reality TV show where watching people live in a house together, but the element of Survivor that really changed TV, that made it such compelling television, was that these are players that have to work together and also simultaneously vote each other out.

It was just the first time it had ever been done.

And then after that, shows kind of immediately took that format.

And Big Brother was born.

The Amazing Race was born.

Other reality shows took that model of having players work together and also have to eliminate each other.

But that had never been seen or done on TV before.

And I think that's what made it really compelling television.

Well, what it was is I had a good friend and colleague, Jennifer, and the two of us, we would, after every episode on Wednesday night, Thursday morning, we'd meet, you know, around the coffee machine, the water cooler, and we're talking about what did you think about the show?

What did you see in the show?

And one of the things we noticed is as we were breaking down and analyzing the show is that what we were seeing on our TV screens were also behaviors that we were seeing in our university classrooms.

And so one day as a thought experiment, we started thinking about what could we put into a course outline?

If we did design a course on Survivor, what would that actually look like?

What do we see in our students that we could put that would be interesting for them to explore?

In our classes, we talk a lot about leadership, group process, how to make decisions as a group to make sure everyone is involved.