310. The Tribe

CBS has announced that Survivor, the television program in which real humans are dropped on a remote island without food or shelter and told to outlast each other, will be adapted into an animated movie. The contestants will be portrayed as cartoon animals.

Survivor has been on the air since 2000. (This is twenty-six years. I am not making this number up. It has been on longer than some of the people currently watching it have been alive, which is a separate thing to think about.) The premise of Survivor is that humans, when stripped of basic necessities and surrounded by other humans who are also being stripped of basic necessities, will reveal something true about human nature. The show has documented this across forty-eight seasons. The documentation is extensive. The findings are ongoing.

In the animated version, the contestants will be cartoon animals.

I want to be specific about what cartoon animals are and are not. Cartoon animals do not lose eleven pounds in the first twelve days because they miscalculated the caloric value of raw coconut. Cartoon animals do not develop the intestinal parasites that appear in the medical confessionals around day eighteen and that, if you have watched the medical confessionals carefully, are often the actual turning point of the game. (I have watched the medical confessionals carefully. The parasites are specific. They have names.) Cartoon animals do not sunburn because they negotiated away their tarp on day four for a fire-starting kit that turned out to be broken.

These are conditions. Survivor is, at its core, a show about what humans do when the conditions are bad. Cartoon animals are not subject to the conditions. Cartoon animals are categorically fine.

The show is hosted by Jeff Probst. Jeff Probst has hosted Survivor for all forty-eight seasons. In that time, he has stood at the head of tribal councils on beaches in Borneo and Fiji and Samoa and a rotating series of locations that are all described as "remote" and has said the words "the tribe has spoken" approximately six hundred times. He has snuffed several hundred torches.

Whether Jeff Probst will tell a cartoon wolf that the tribe has spoken has not been addressed.

CBS has not announced who will play the animated contestants. CBS has announced that they will be cartoon animals. This is the current state of the information.

Both versions of Survivor can apparently exist simultaneously. The real show, with real humans and real parasites and real torches, continues airing on Wednesdays. The animated version is in development.

This is not a problem that requires solving.

I am choosing not to think too hard about what it means.