He is, I begin, the smartest, or at least the best at a Machiavellian maneouvering among people who are less observant than him. And those awful things I said about him last week, well, they were out of my grudging sense of respect. And Survivor gets under my skin, in part, because it feels so present-tense, so real. Cost is the immediate reason. Even gorging on the highest quality and costliest, Beta video, the budget is a fraction of what it would take to shoot an equivalent amount on film.
Video is easier, too.
I can feed images directly from a digital video camera into my computer and edit them there. I can fit hundreds of hours of raw footage in a backpack, as tapes or as disks. I could not move the equivalent amount of film without the aid of heavy machinery. Surely not the six it would take to get to Kevin Bacon. Of course, the video cameras used to record programs such as Cops or Big Brother are of a much higher quality than your home video-camera, but better technology becomes more affordable every month.