What a Reality-TV Novel Understands About Reality
There’s a saying on Survivor: “Perception is reality.” There’s a saying on TikTok: “Do it for the plot.”
Both maxims are about the stories people tell themselves. The first acknowledges that someone’s read of a situation will shape the outcome—even if they’re reading things wrong. The second declares that all of life is a story and you need to provide the drama.
The desire to treat life as a narrative—and then control that narrative—is the subject of Stephen Fishbach’s debut novel, Escape!, a literary thriller that follows a single season of a fictional reality survival show from casting to airtime. Fishbach writes from experience: He was a two-time contestant on Survivor and co-hosts a Survivor podcast. To inform his book, he interviewed many other reality contestants and crew members. The result marries the plot twists of a competition show with compassionate portraits of the people involved who are searching for identity and meaning. It’s both an examination of how the reality-TV sausage gets made and a reminder that people can sacrifice their humanity if they focus too much on making the plot—of a television program, of life itself—exciting.
Escape! joins many other stories inspired by reality television. The Lifetime show UnREAL, which was co-created by a former Bachelor producer, similarly offered an insider’s view of the underbelly of reality-TV production. Books such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars use reality TV as scaffolding for dystopias in which entertainment is used to numb a populace to injustice. Aisling Rawle’s 2025 book The Compound features a Big Brother–meets–dating show setup as a way to explore how materialist greed can impede connection. The drama alone of reality TV makes it a compelling subject for fiction. But the genre feels particularly relevant today, more than 25 years after the first season of Survivor aired, when anyone with a social-media account can perform a version of themselves on a small screen. Every Instagram or TikTok post presents questions of how to edit a life.
Fishbach’s novel stands out because it explores the complicated dynamics of self-narrativizing—and because it’s enriched by the behind-the-scenes details informed by his firsthand experience. The show in Escape! is not Survivor, but it rhymes: Both have an island-jungle setting, outdoor-obstacle-course competitions, alliances, and backstabbing. Both administer a personality test during casting and keep players’ medications in a box in the jungle out of sight of cameras. Contestants can tell when their fellow players are plotting, Fishbach writes, because the crew moves the boom mic closer to them. (Fishbach writes in an author’s note that though many plot points are inspired by true events, “nothing in this book should be taken to impugn” the staff of Survivor. And Survivor exists in the world of the novel, as if to emphasize that Fishbach isn’t really describing the show he was once on.) He’s a funny observer of some of the genre’s more ridiculous tropes. When the contestants compete for a food reward, he writes that they “rub their stomachs and pull O-faces at the idea of these soggy pastries, mirroring the reaction shots they’ve seen from other contestants on previous shows.” Although a couple of the producer characters veer into cartoonish villainy, for the most part Fishbach manages to critique reality TV while maintaining empathy for those who make it.
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Driving the novel is each character’s relentless pursuit of a story arc that they hope will redeem, transform, or elevate them. All of Fishbach’s characters—Miriam, the timid young contestant who hopes the show will give her a life-changing revelation; Kent, the has-been reality star looking to recapture his former glory; Beck, the disgraced producer projecting her issues onto the cast; and a collection of other reality-show archetypes who populate the background—are laser-focused on The Edit. (The Edit is “shorthand for the story that a TV show tells about a character,” as Beck explains. “Our job is to simplify and clarify.”)
Fishbach surely knows a thing or two about how the narrative structure of reality TV flattens people. In his first appearance, on Survivor: Tocantins, he has said he was portrayed as “more heroic than I am,” while in his second season, Survivor: Cambodia, he was sometimes played for laughs. “During its airing, I felt a lot of shame every week wondering which of my moments would be edited for maximum comic effect,” he told Entertainment Weekly. In Escape!, Fishbach portrays The Edit as, at best, a necessary evil, and, at worst, a life-ruining malevolence. The players obsess over how the show will digest their actions, what kind of narrative it will spit out. Will they get a Loser Edit or a Hero Edit? When Kent approaches the island for the first time, for example, he is “already thinking about how he’ll describe it in his interviews.” The producers manipulate the players into embodying the characters they preordained during casting and pat themselves on the back for constructing such a good story. Beck is not above using a woman’s dead son to make her emotional enough to quit, or browbeating Miriam into killing a pig for the sake of her “growth arc.” Compelled to redo a shark hunt that the cameras missed the first time, one contestant gets seriously injured.
Even as the producers’ manipulations turn dangerous, Escape! is clear that the contestants are complicit co-creators of their simplified selves. Kent, Fishbach writes, is “not here for the cash, or the plotting and scheming, or the banter. He’s here to slip into the old costume, which has started to sag and tear. He’s here to be Kent Duvall.” The heroic character he was edited into during his first season feels more real to him than the miserable person he is in his actual life. He’s trying to return to a self that only ever existed on a screen. Miriam goes along with Beck’s heavy-handed suggestions that she, not Kent, should be the hero, in part because she thinks the show might transform her into a new, somehow truer version of herself.
Although most readers of Escape! will never find themselves competing on TV, the characters’ concerns are relatable. Humans can’t help but see life as a narrative. An innate part of our psychology is arranging memories, experiences, and desires into a coherent story. Psychologists say that these stories form our personalities, our very selves. Reality TV preys on this natural impulse and can warp it to dehumanizing extremes.
Fishbach captures how reality TV takes the internal process of turning your life into a story, and makes it external. Who hasn’t replayed a moment in their mind, imagining what they could have done differently, what they should have said? The contestants on Escape! really do relive the same moment over and over with slight variations, as the camera operators insist on take after take. They get feedback from producers in real time on whether they’re living up to the role they’re supposed to play. It’s intoxicating: “On the show, every morsel of food he ate, how long he slept, every passing whim or frustration, mattered urgently to the producers,” Kent thinks. “It was how life should be, all the purposefulness of a religion, that the trivial opinions and feuds of your tiny existence mattered in the eyes of God.”
Reality television isn’t the only place where people can elevate their tiny existence into a grand narrative. Social media has long encouraged users to present their lives as easily legible stories—a mindset that seems to have intensified in recent years. During the height of the pandemic, posters diagnosed themselves and others with “main-character syndrome,” which, depending on whom you ask, is either a form of extreme narcissism or a way of empowering yourself by pretending you’re the star of a movie. The internet serves up a buffet of character types that people can strive to become or avoid becoming: clean girl, tradwife, Pilates princess, performative male, Chad. And if you’re wondering if you should do something ill-advised, such as text your ex, posters may cheekily encourage you to “do it for the plot.”
The sheer volume of stories people are exposed to in modern life can drown out the ability to hear one’s own true voice. At one point in Escape!, Beck wonders whether her work of unearthing contestants’ stories has any meaning, when so many meanings are imposed on everyone from the outside: “Maybe the very idea of depths, of an ‘authentic self,’ was merely another story, buried under layers of stories,” Fishbach writes. “We were all palimpsests of platitudes.”
Yet the book doesn’t give in to that despair. Toward the end of the novel, Kent remembers a touching moment with fellow contestants from his first TV appearance. He realizes he forgot it for years because it didn’t make the show’s final cut. When you edit down the mess of life, something is always deleted. But perhaps, Fishbach suggests, it’s not lost forever.
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