respond calmly and rationally, and maintain consistency about what he was saying. Others, however, noted strange shifts in his writing style, sometimes lucid and authoritative, other times vague, rambling, and incoherent, as if someone was ghostwriting some of his posts.
Early on, ChillOne’s credibility took a licking. The “Asian American” (Daniel) wasn’t the first one booted, as “Uncle Boatman” had predicted, and so everyone was ready to bury the theory until Daniel went the third week, pretty much according to the logic that ChillOne had outlined. And so it went, week by nail-biting week, with ChillOne’s information proving to be more or less right, but each week something contradicted his claims. He gained some credibility by midseason when the news media picked up the story of a Las Vegas gambling operation that discontinued betting on the Survivor outcomes when it caught some CBS employees placing bets on what they suspected might be insider information. They had been gambling on Matthew and Jenna for the final two, and this seemed to prove ChillOne knew his stuff, until people realized that someone from CBS might have been monitoring the boards and had been betting that ChillOne was right. It had happened before when the spoiling community had trusted some consistently accurate predictions from a Boston newspaper as backing up their inside information on Survivor: The Australian Outback until it was clear that the reporter was just writing his column based on stuff he learned from the online discussions.
In the end, ChillOne got it right, assuming Jenna was “Jana” and the thirty-something shaggy-haired Matthew was the twenty-something man with the “close haircut.” Maybe it would be more accurate to say that ChillOne’s intel helped the spoilers get within striking distance of the right answer, even if many Sucksters trusted their guts over his inside dope: they couldn’t believe that Jenna, the spoiled brat, could win out over the hardworking but mysterious Matthew. For a community like this one, which thrives on debates about the validity of information, a loose consensus is about all one can expect at the present time. Some things become common beliefs that everyone accepts, and on other matters, the group, gladly and gleefully, agrees to disagree.
The Evil Pecker and His Minions
We may never know for sure where ChillOne’s information came from. From the start, the skeptics had two prevailing theories: that he was in some way linked to the production company, or that he was a hoaxer. Both of these theories were plausible, given their experiences over the previous seasons.
The spoilers had every reason to believe that Mark Burnett played an active role in shaping the flow of information around the series. They called him “Evil Pecker Mark,” a play on EP (which also stands for “Executive Producer”). CBS had admitted that they, like many other production companies, monitored the discussion lists for information about the audience. Here’s Chris Ender, CBS senior VP of communications: “In the first season, there was a ground swell of attention in there. We started monitoring the message boards to actually help guide us in what would resonate in our marketing. It’s just the best marketing research you can get.”11 The fans had every reason to believe that someone from Burnett’s office was listening to what they were saying—and some reason to believe that they were being lied to, at least some of the time, in a deliberate effort to shape the reception of the series. Here’s host Jeff Probst describing his role in this process: “We have so many lies going, and we have so much misinformation that there is usually an out; there is usually a way to recover [from a slip]. I can tell you who the winner is right now and you wouldn’t know whether to believe me or not.”12
First-season fans started scrutinizing the opening credits for clues and spotted an image of nine contestants at what looked like a tribal council session.13 They used that image to narrow down the boot order—though in some cases, questions remained, since it was possible one person was voting when the picture was taken and some of the people were in the shadows, leading to debates about who they really were. The picture turned out to be misleading, read out of context. No one was sure whether the producer meant to send them on a wild-goose chase. Later in the first season, the behind-the-scenes machinations of the show’s producers made the national news in what became known as “Gervase X.” Spoilers figured out the URL for the directory tree on the official CBS Web site and dug around behind the scenes, unearthing fifteen unlinked images showing all but one of the contestants, Gervase, Xed out. The fans were convinced that the African American coach was the only one who never got booted, up until the moment that Gervase got voted off the island. Both Mark Burnett and Ghen Maynard, the CBS executive in charge of reality programming, have publicly acknowledged that they planted that misleading clue. From then on, the rules of the game had changed. Shawn summarized the shift of attitude: “Before it was Mark Burnett that naïve unassuming producer/idiot letting all of his secrets flood out. Now it was Mark Burnett deceiver, Mark Burnett the Devil, Evil Pecker Mark. Now we knew he was trying to keep secrets and it was game on.”14
Burnett had the last laugh in that first season. There was a really big clue in the opening credit: as the announcer is explaining that “only one will remain to win the title of sole survivor and one million dollars … in cash,” he had shown, from the first episode forward, a shot of Richard Hatch, the actual winner, walking alone across a rope bridge with a big smile on his face. The spoilers had seen it and dismissed it, believing it couldn’t be that simple—and after that, it wasn’t.
From then on, the spoilers watched the episodes more closely, using their single frame advance to search for embedded clues, keeping track of the shots of animals that often functioned metaphorically to foreshadow the rising or falling fortunes of individuals or teams, looking at editing patterns to see which characters were being foregrounded and which hidden. Tapewatcher developed an intriguing theory about Survivor: Africa based on what he saw as biblical allusions surrounding the long-haired, bearded, and Jewish Ethan, who he believed was going to win out over his more transgressive competitors. Again and again, Ethan’s image was coupled with a distinctive lens flair that looked a bit like the Star of David. “Follow the star,” and you will find the winner, Tapewatcher predicted, and, strange as it seems, he was right. Tapewatcher presented his argument in page after page of richly detailed close textual analysis, accompanied in some cases by images grabbed off the video tape and in some cases by actual streaming footage.15 Is it possible that the show’s editors planted clues for viewers? This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Another reality series, The Mole, planted equally obscure clues that it assumed people armed with VCRs and the Internet would sort through. A good chunk of the final episode of each season was spent mapping them out for viewers “too dense” to spot them hidden in the background of shots or arranged in the first letters of the last names of the production crew on the closing credits.
As soon as the Survivor fans found an editing pattern that might help them foretell a winner, Burnett shifted his style for the next season. There were even rumors, never confirmed or denied, that once a guess circulated broadly, the production staff reedited subsequent episodes to strip out elements they knew the spoiler community was looking for. After all, the late episodes were still being cut as the early ones aired. Burnett liked to talk about Survivor as a psychological experiment to see how people would react under extreme circumstances. Was he also playing an experiment with his audience to watch how an information society would respond to misdirection?
By the sixth season, there was a growing sense that Burnett was losing interest in the spoilers, much as a segment of the audience was losing interest in the series. As one fan grumbled, “I want CBS to play the game. They are not playing the game.” If ChillOne was telling the truth, then security on the Survivor production site was getting unforgivably sloppy. Or, more optimistically, the fans would have pulled off a coup for which the series might never recover. As one fan exclaimed, “Picture what a fine panic such a thing might cause!”
If ChillOne was lying, if ChillOne was a plant or, even better, if Burnett himself was going undercover on the boards, that would be the producer’s biggest stunt ever. One Suckster explained: “CBS would never allow accidental information to come into the hand of a lay person.
