Charlie Parsons created three of the most boundary-pushing formats in British television history: The Word, The Big Breakfast, and Survivor. The last of these became one of the most widely distributed formats ever made, running in over fifty territories and transforming the global television landscape. Getting it there took the better part of a decade, a string of rejections from the biggest broadcasters in the world, and one small Swedish production company willing to say yes when everyone else said no. In this conversation, Parsons tells the story of how Survivor found its home and what it reveals about the ecosystems that produce, and kill, genuinely original ideas.
The origins of Survivor predate the format industry as we now know it. In the late 1980s, Parsons was working on a boundary-pushing magazine show for Channel 4 called Network 7. The brief, such as it was, was to think the unthinkable, to put things on screen that nobody thought could go on screen.
In that spirit, he sent four people to a remote island and filmed what happened. A soap opera star, an ex-convict, a tennis player, a stockbroker. Three weeks. No script. Just people, an island, and a camera. It was, he says: “Rather good television”.
But it was a short-form documentary item inside a magazine show, not a format. The idea stayed with him. When he set up his own production company in 1990, it came back, gnawing at him, as he puts it. Now he understood the commercial logic: it had to be long-running, it had to have longevity, it had to make money. He started developing it properly.
“I always thought when I had the Big Breakfast that I could do this. I was given space, I had a business prerogative, and I thought: what isn’t on TV and what would be wonderful?”
“I always thought when I had the Big Breakfast that I could do this. I was given space, I had a business prerogative, and I thought: what isn’t on TV and what would be wonderful?”
– Charlie Parsons
Our reflections: Parsons’s account of Survivor’s origins illustrates something that the ecosystem research consistently confirms: the great transformational formats are not commissioned into existence. They emerge from a combination of creative freedom, commercial necessity, and the space to fail and then try again. Network 7’s magazine format gave Parsons the freedom to experiment without the weight of a full commission. The Big Breakfast gave him the financial base to pursue development seriously. And the commercial logic of format television gave him the framework to turn a documentary idea into something that could travel.
What followed was one of the longest rejection sequences in format history. Parsons pitched Survivor (then called Survive) to ABC in the United States, to ITV in the UK, and to Channel 4. Each broadcaster loved it. None of them could commission it.
The problem was always the same: they couldn’t work out what department it fitted in. Was it a variety show? A documentary? A soap opera? The format sat between categories that broadcasters had built entire commissioning structures around. And what sits between categories has nowhere to go.
“They were confused. They wanted something which they could categorise. And this was a hybrid, or you could say it was its own thing. It was different from what had been on before.”
Our reflections:
The pattern of Survivor’s rejections is not random. It reflects a structural feature of large commissioning organisations: the tendency to measure new ideas against existing categories. When a format fits no known category, it has no natural home. The people who might champion it such as commissioning editors and heads of entertainment face a straightforward institutional disincentive: if you put your head above the parapet and it fails, you might lose your job. If you pass on something safe, nothing bad happens.
In 1997, two companies expressed serious interest in Survivor at the MIPTV market in Cannes: Endemol, and a small Swedish production company called Strix. Only Strix actually moved. They pitched it to the Swedish public broadcaster SVT. They said yes.
The show launched as Expedition Robinson. It became the most expensive entertainment commission in SVT’s history at that point roughly three million euros, a figure that required considerable institutional courage from a public broadcaster.
Parsons was surprised it happened in Sweden.
“Sweden doesn’t hit you as: oh, this is where formats begin. I had these big successes in the UK and I thought that’s where it should be. But the truth is, the people who knew it was good in the UK couldn’t quite see how it would fit in.”
For two years, Expedition Robinson ran in Sweden and Scandinavia without making any meaningful impact on the UK or American markets. The world of format distribution in the late 1990s was VHS tapes and phone calls. Nobody in London or Los Angeles was watching Swedish television.
Our reflections: The Swedish launch of Survivor is one of the clearest illustrations in this research of how small markets create the conditions for original format development. SVT had the institutional culture to take a risk on something genuinely unfamiliar. The cultural conditions like high uncertainty acceptance and public legitimacy for entertainment made the commission possible. And the small market meant that the financial stakes, while significant for SVT, were manageable in a way they would not have been for ITV or ABC. Parsons did not choose Sweden. Sweden chose the format, because it had the ecosystem to give it a chance.
The American chapter of Survivor‘s story takes off after a party in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles, in 1995. Parsons was there developing Survivor (or Survive as it was called then) for Buena Vista. He met a producer he had never heard of, Mark Burnett, who asked what he was working on. Parsons told him about the island idea. Burnett said he wanted to make it.
“I said, oh well, fat chance because I’m going to make it. But he was very keen. And afterwards every six months, he’d ring me to ask me if he could do it.”
Four years later, after a miserable year in Los Angeles producing a show with talent he didn’t get along with, Parsons picked up the phone when Burnett called again. He agreed to license the show.
Burnett turned out to be exactly what the American market needed: someone who could network with executives in a way that Parsons, by his own admission, was terrible at. He pitched it to every network. CBS bought it but only on the condition that Burnett raised much of the production budget through sponsorship and advertising.
Even at that stage, the ailing network was not convinced. The Swedish proof of concept was acknowledged and then discounted.
“It was slightly discounted because it was too small a country. And they don’t speak the same language.”
The final irony came in the UK. After Survivor became a phenomenon in America, complete with Survivor parties covered on the BBC evening news, an ITV producer in Los Angeles saw the coverage, came back to London, and pitched ITV on this amazing American show called Survivor. They commissioned it immediately. Nobody noticed it was the same format they had passed on several times years earlier.
“They didn’t recognise it was the same show that I’d pitched. That’s how it ended up at ITV.”