New York Times ranks Survivor as the top reality show of the 21st century

TheNew York Times' buzzed-about(and Sopranos-exclusionary) attempt to catalog the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century gaveSurvivorits just due. Voted on by "516 actors, showrunners, writers, producers, executives, craftspeople, and other TV industry experts," the pioneering CBS reality television experience unlike any other finished 31st, the top ranking ofanyreality show.

Survivoredged out beloved narrative shows likeTrue Detective(Season 1),Schitt's CreekandThe Pitt, and Mark Burnett andJeff Probst'sbaby is still going strong,premiering with a new levelof "permanent uncertainty" for season 51 on Wednesday evening.

Any diehard fan of this show, whether they've ridden the long journey to and fromExile Islandor they're just rejoining after a lengthy hiatus (a la Colby Donaldson), will tell you they wouldn't have it any other way.

Real Survivor fans feel vindicated after New York Times 100 Best list

My personalSurvivorjourney involves a gap, a pandemic reality, and a yearning for community.

I was as locked-in as locked-in gets from the moment a close friend recommended we watch the season 1 finale after their family had doggedly watched the narrative unfold all autumn long. I began at perhaps the show's most iconic point, watching him gasp over snakes and rats and wondering how anything I'd missed could possibly top the series' conclusion. Needless to say, I was seated for theSurvivor: The Australian Outbackpremiere, and didn't need to convince my family to watch along.

Each day on the playground, my five closest friends and I would play our own version of the game; surprisingly, most of our challenges involved monkey bars and four-square, neither of which appears in thenew, open era (so far).

I was a devoted viewer throughSurvivor: All-Stars, but between high school baseball, college prep, and I think a deep-down feeling that season 8 represented a line in the sand and an end to the first version of the show, with which I was intimately familiar, I lost the thread in its aftermath. Forever,Survivorto me would be Rosie O'Donnell on a motorcycle at the reunion. I didn't know Coach Wade. Never met Russell Hantz. Certainly never met Brandon Hantz.

But that all changed when the pandemic knocked on our doors, shutting down the world - except for one Fijian season ofSurvivorthat was already in the can. A few of my elementary school friends had never given up the chase; they planned to watch, and offered to get me on board and caught up as quickly as possible. My college pal sent me a Google Doc guide of the 31 seasons I'd overlooked in the interim,ranked by impact,returning players, and overall vibes. I followed his recommendations, but didn't leave a single year unwatched, no matter how strange (yes, evenSurvivor:Vanuatu, which I somehow cannot extricate from my brain to this day).

The obsession grew quickly. I donated to Rupert Boneham's charity. I tracked down Yau-Man Chan, and he invited my wife and I to a private Zoom to discuss his exploits (along with another podcaster, who was very nice and probably wasn't thrilled to see us). When the world opened back up, I joined a Fantasy League with my connective friends, the ones who'd ushered in my fandom from the beginning. The league expanded. The boundaries swelled. The show pushed towards a milestone 50th season, then powered past it.

No show of any kind has the staying power, adaptability, and wide range of characters thatSurvivordoes. I can't imagine any other show being able to fuel the same childlike emotion within me after a legitimate 15-year gap. If that's not the greatest reality show of the century, then what is?

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