Grab your torches

Tonight is one of the most decadent nights in the TV season: the night of the "Survivor" finale on CBS. Two hours of the finale, bleeding into the ridiculous live vote-count announcement, followed by the nearly unwatchable reunion show, which I somehow usually find watchable. I really love "Survivor," which I know puts me squarely in the 2001 time capsule, but it can't be denied. I love it.

I rediscovered "Survivor" a few years ago and it became a staple of my Thursday nights. I like talking about strategy during the show, figuring out how scenarios might play out, who should vote for who, etc, and I even find myself thinking about these things during the rest of the week. The theme music is good (vaguely ethnic, vaguely world-beat) and you can pronounce the contestants' names in funny accents as they appear. Plus, the challenges are usually pretty creative and well-organized (unlike MTV's lame Real World/Road Rules challenges, which always end up in disqualifications and ties because the producers make things too difficult for their hung-over, drug-addled and over-sexed cast; don't get me started) and CBS dumps a whole lot of money into making hokey things like "tribal council" somehow seem vaguely cool (if not really authentic).

Like most other reality shows, I definitely would not want to be on it, for a lot of reasons. I don't know if I could handle the rest of the weirdos they cast; I don't want to put myself in gym-class-like scenarios, with money on the line; and I don't think being on a reality show would be good for my life, overall. But on the other hand, I would really enjoy the part where you write down somebody's name to vote them off, and then whisper into the camera your rationale. I would write in big block letters, every time, and the producers would end up coming out from behind their duck blind or whatever to make me stop writing, because after I voted out somebody in the game, I'd continue writing down names of people who simply need to go, and explaining why to the camera: George W. Bush, my copyright professor, Osama Bin Laden, etc. So that when the wankerish Jeff Probst read out the votes, the results would be like: four for Regine, two for Diego, and one for Mitt Romney. And I'd be sitting there wondering why my anti-Mitt alliance only scored one vote, again.

Anyways, so I'm excited for the finale tonight. This has been a fairly boring season: no real David and Goliath success stories, or miraculous triumphs, or good guys vanquishing bad guys, but there are still some interesting possible outcomes. It's something to look forward to at the end of a cold and slushy Sunday, when the city gets stuck with all the horrible leftover parts of a nor-easter (meteorological meat loaf), rain and wind and cold without some thick fat snowflakes to pretty things up and muffle the noise. But there will be time for that later; tonight it's time to eat a lot and yell at the tv. Grab your torches, head back to camp.