Re: MEDIA: Over the edge TV

Kathryn Aegis (k_aegis@mindspring.com)
Fri, 08 Oct 1999 15:48:06

At 12:16 PM 10/8/99 -0700, Robert Bradbury wrote:
>This is simply over the edge! Imagine the scenarios...
>Since the island is in the South China Sea there is no
>law enforcement, you could arrange "accidents" for people
>you don't like. Do you play the game with alliances
>(required for survival) or deceit and betrayal?
>Or if we assume most of the applicants will be men, and you
>happened to be a woman who had enjoyed sex a lot...

I think that the producers would want to start with a balance of genders, otherwise it could turn violent very quickly. Franz de Waal has written accounts of escalating violence that took place within chimpanzee populations in which the number of females got reduced for some reason. The remaining females faced rape and many died from exhaustion. Many of the males died in the fighting. Now, I'm not saying that humans can't act better than that, and maybe the presence of cameras would act as a dampening mechanism. But the
tensions would be there, nonetheless.

And, please, don't bring up Lord of the Flies! That novel was written as a specific scenario, deliberately constructed so as to remove every civilizing influence--maturity, parental figures, another gender, a system of rules, etc.

Kathryn Aegis