I tune in every week for the joy of watching Ozzy’s genuinely moral, selfless, humble, and spiritual game contrast with Coach and Brandon’s hypocritical one. Both gaming strategies involve aspects of excess, but the different ways to bring excess into the game speak to the split between Ozzy’s genuine game and Coach and Brandon’s phony game. Coach and Brandon’s excess ultimately comes through over-the-top performances of religious faith, which humorously and ironically point out Coach’s ego-centered motives and Brandon’s mentally unstable personality during moments when they claim to be charitable. Coach’s numerous prayer sessions are less about serving God and more about rallying the tribe to put faith in him as a leader who dictates what cast members to vote off, with the end goal being to put Coach in the final two with someone who would receive fewer votes in the final tribal council. While Coach tries to bring his tribe members together through prayer—a gaming strategy of unity, he strategically plays the game just as much through one-on-one or two-on-one secretive meetings where he manipulatively plots out whom to send home, how to blind side the competitor, and how to have the numbers always work to make him least vulnerable. The tensions between Coach’s ego-centered goals and ego-less claims come to a head in excessive moments, such as when the cast members had to paint themselves for a challenge. Coach painted a cross on his face, prayed during the physical competition to serve God properly, and then quickly gathered his team together for a prayer after they won, making sure he was in the center of the prayer circle.

On the other hand, Ozzy is a servant leader, which is central to many religions. Ozzy’s leadership comes through not in making sure that the numbers will serve him to advance to the next round but by sacrificing his body and potentially his place in the game so that his tribe can continue on successfully. At the first tribal council after the merger, Ozzy offered his immunity necklace to Savaii tribe member Whitney so that she could be saved and so the tribe wouldn’t be hurt. Ozzy also came up with the brilliant strategy to send himself to Redemption Island instead of the tribe voting for Cochran, which it wanted to do, so that he could win the challenge at Redemption Island and then later rejoin Savaii after the merger and give them a numbers advantage. (This worked out, but the merged tribe later sent Ozzy back to Redemption because Cochran turned on Ozzy and others.) A moving moment on this season occured when the members of Upolu sent Cochran to Redemption Island, and Ozzy greeted Cochran with kindness, charitably offering him a space in his covered sleeping area. Most people would have shunned a rat like Cochran who ruined their tribe.

Ozzy is the most moral and ethical competitor in this season of Survivor, but the series delightfully packages him in epic scenes of transcendental religious communion with nature. Ozzy’s been on Redemption for a while, and he’ll probably play his way back into the game. Episodes with Ozzy on Redemption show him communing with nature, swimming with fishes, and climbing to the top of hundred-foot high trees. Long haired and long bearded, Ozzy looks like Jesus. He constantly offers tribe members and people on Redemption Island fish, a symbol of Christian faith. Ozzy is so excessively coded as a Christ figure that his fans are awaiting his resurrection from Redemption to the game.

There are often religious people on Survivor, but there have never been so many of them offering us so much viewing pleasure. For instance, last season when several tribe mates joined together for prayer and Biblical interpretation, eventual season winner Boston Rob looked at them like an alligator calmly waiting in the water to attack his prey and noted that, even though he’s religious, religion has no part of this game and he’ll send them packing. He was right for that season. But things change between seasons. Last season I cheered for Boston Rob’s cunningness; this season I’m rooting for Ozzy. His selfless, humble, packaged-in-excess spiritual style has won me over.

Survivor

The season that concluded this past Sunday had a rogues’ gallery of the stupid and the obnoxious. Rampant and egregious lying was the predominant tactic; those who tended to be straightforward and loyal were either incredibly passive or prone to insulting other players. Two different contestants committed acts of thievery, of property both personal (a $1600 pair of alligator shoes brought on an outdoor adventure show) and communal (a significant amount of the tribal food cache). Several players commented that they had to improve their behavior, primarily by shutting up so as to stop annoying everyone around them, and then proved completely incapable of doing so, sealing their doom. One young man was openly homophobic; a young woman crowed about administering a physical smackdown to a player with one leg. Even the less obnoxious players seemed incapable of sticking together when faced with being marginalized by a well-organized bloc, continually voting against each other in futile attempts to curry favor with those in control.

In previous seasons, players who exhibited physical strength and charisma sometimes found themselves targeted for removal by other players who feared their popularity and ability to win contests that provided protection from being thrown out of the game. The recent season was the first that I watched in which the elimination of successful players became the driving engine of the show. It was the Triumph of the Stupid, Nasty, and Mediocre, whose pronounced insecurity led them to purge the most visibly intelligent and accomplished players as dire threats. A doctor and a medical student, both amiable and mature, were purged quickly, as were the player with the sunniest attitude and the most inspirational leader, to be followed by the more visibly astute strategists. The physically strong stayed in the game longer, through lucky breaks or because they hid their potential for athletic dominance in early challenges.

Survivor has sometimes lost contestants to serious physical maladies, with the producers forcing players to quit based on medical advice. The 2010 series was the first in which two players just upped and quit, defeated by the elements and their own whims. One, Naonka, had quickly established herself as the clearest villain in the narrative, stealing food and bullying other players. In soliloquies, she had played up her toughness, no-nonsense attitude, and ambition to do whatever it would take to win, but then cried every time it rained. She announced her voluntary departure from the competition in the same breath that she claimed a birthright of a “family of strong black women” who never quit.

I am no fan of train-wreck TV, and this season would have certainly qualified for being dropped from my viewing schedule, yet I found the contest compelling. I fear that Survivor is becoming infected with the ethos of the shows of dysfunctional characters and condescending viewers; Survivor always has had opportunities for both, but also has supplied positive points of identification and interesting strategic plotting. More worryingly, perhaps the problems of this season reflected not its intra-generic drift but a bigger model upon which the contestants could base their actions. I had stopped watching news channels recently, and perhaps I kept watching Survivor because it became a metaphor for the political situation I was trying to avoid. It was all there: the defining of others primarily as threats; the rampant mendacity; the distrust of the educated. Two contestants were already millionaires, but wanted still more; the character with the loudest braggadocio got away with incredible obnoxiousness, only to suddenly bail on her teammates, leaving them in a strategic lurch. Those proclaiming traditional small-town values bonded in opposing high-tech snobs, then destroyed each other.

Yet the finale of Survivor justified the pained viewing of several months; in the end, a cheery young man who talked like a surfer and had been written off by the majority alliance as a moronic goofball managed to sneak into the final rounds, display hidden physical and mental gifts, and be rewarded in the final vote for his relative honesty, winning the grand prize against two huge liars. He thereby proclaimed that he would use the prize money to help his family and study ethnomusicology. Dude! In this dark hour, Survivor supplied a happy ending. The tribe has spoken. If THAT group could finally get it right, can we?