Segregated ‘Survivor’ setup may have merit

Throughout his reign as reality TV’s undisputed puppet master, Mark Burnett has never been able to shake allegations that, through casting, editing or both, his shows in general and “Survivor” in particular tend to portray minority contestants in one of four flavors: lazy, crazy, angry or a triple-swirl of all three. So for the upcoming 13th season of “Survivor,” Burnett has the ideal solution:

Segregation.

Seriously.

Segregation.

In “Survivor: Cook Islands,” which debuts Sept. 14, the 20 contestants will be divided along racial lines, with a white team, an African American team, an Asian team and a Hispanic team. At some point during the season, the teams will be merged or shuffled. (Last season’s gimmick of splitting up teams by age and gender was dumped in only the second episode.)

At first glance, the idea’s appalling, but there might be some genuine merit in it. If nothing else, after years of casting only one or two minority tokens each season, Burnett finally has a cast that resembles the population of America.

Previous contestants of color — Gervase the loafer, Clarence the bean-stealer, Sean and his cries of slavery — had to carry the banner for an entire race. When the show casts its latest blond princess, no one cries sexism because there are a half-dozen or more other white women of various personalities and work ethics.

“It’s just unfortunate that there aren’t more minorities on the show,” Gervase Peterson told me four years ago, while acknowledging that the show’s applicants are overwhelmingly white. (Burnett and company made an extra effort to find minority contestants this time.) “If there were, you would get a totally different mix of people. You would have people who would totally reinforce good stereotypes of black people, Asians, Puerto Ricans, and you’d get people who reinforce the negative stereotypes. When the pickings are slim, this is what you’re getting.”

By the very nature of boxing’s demographics, the contestants on Burnett’s “The Contender” have been mostly black and Latino, and they run the emotional gamut, from cocky to humble, from hotheaded to thoughtful.

And by segregating the contestants, even if only for a few episodes, the show may be able to deal with another minority contestant complaint: that being surrounded by nothing but white people either altered their own behavior or caused it to be misinterpreted.

Ramona, who was briefly Gervase’s teammate in that first season, was an outgoing woman in the real world who had grown up in predominantly black environments; on the island, she withdrew into a shell and was an early target for elimination even before she became too sick to compete in challenges. Sean from “Marquesas” always insisted after the fact that much of what he said was meant in jest, but his teammates just viewed him as a stereotypical angry black man, which made him genuinely angry, after a while, at getting the cold shoulder.

When the show divided teams by gender in “Survivor: Amazon,” it shook up the usual social dynamics — at least until the tribes were shuffled and everyone reverted to their normal behavior (flirting, lust, misogyny). Maybe the pre-shuffle episodes of “Cook Islands” will show all the contestants in new, enlightening ways.

Then again, maybe not. Reality TV, even a show as polished and respectable as “Survivor,” isn’t an ideal venue for exploring the subtleties of race in America. The storytelling demands — huge cast, a need to devote at least two-thirds of each episode to game play, etc. — are going to make it all but impossible for “Cook Islands” to get much more than skin deep.

This has the potential to be either mildly enlightening or a massive train wreck. But, either way, it ought to accomplish Burnett’s chief goal: to revive public interest in his 6-year-old franchise.