Survivor: Borneo

originally aired 5/31/2000-8/23/2000

This remains my favorite season of the competition, possibly because the concept was as fresh for the participants as for the viewer, and an outlining how participants and how they left helps illustrate that:

• Sonja (Tagi) The wonderful old lady who survived cancer but not Richard Hatch, the original mother figure and obvious to anyone not expecting a traditional reality show experience to be the first to go.
• B.B. (Pagong) Crotchety old man set the standard for being too bossy and believing in his own superiority.  The first and perhaps last smart movie Pagong made as a tribe.
• Stacey (Tagi) Famously supported the belief that the producers had her tribe vote her own in favor of keeping Rudy around.  Honestly, even if it's true, thank you Tagi.
• Ramona (Pagong) The first official casualty of the physical demands required the play the game, and also the first to prove that it's as much surviving the elements as your own tribemates that gets you further.
• Dirk (Tagi) His legacy is being the first obvious Christian to play the game.  Otherwise an extraneous piece of the Tagi puzzle.
• Joel (Pagong) "Captain America" was a victim of Pagong not realizing that staying strong as a team means putting personal differences aside.  But no one on Pagong realized that numbers equals money in this game.
• Gretchen (Pagong) In some other version of this game, she would have been an obvious winner.  Except she was purely Pagong.  Never realized that she was playing this one.
• Greg (Pagong) The only Pagong who knew what he was doing, but he also used a coconut phone.  The best personality of the season, ended up on the wrong tribe.  
• Jenna (Pagong) The template for the bubbly ditz, even if she still thinks she was anything else.  Known for not getting a video from her babies.
• Gervase (Pagong) Another giant of personality from the season, voted out as the "Sitting Duck," because he lasted long enough to realize Tagi knew what it was doing.
• Colleen (Pagong) The original Survivor sweetheart, the erstwhile "Target," Greg's snuggle buddy, and the first contestant to be the last member of their tribe.
• Sean (Tagi) The doctor of questionable sanity inadvertantly supported the Tagi alliance thanks to his inane alphabet voting method.  He is also the creator of Super Pole 2000, for what it's worth.
• Susan (Tagi) Made immortal by her speech at the final tribal council comparing Kelly and Richard to the two kinds of creatures that they all got to know living on the island, being rats and snakes, and declaring that in the end it should be as nature intended it, for the snake to eat the rat.  
• Rudy (Tagi) The more famous crotchety old man, and the one with all the inadvertently hilarious one-liners.  He's also most responsible for Richard's win, being the first player of unquestioning loyalty in the game as well as part of the original alliance.
• Kelly (Tagi) She tried to have it both ways and discovered that this game almost as a rule simply won't allow it: you can't use trying to be everyone's friend as your best strategy.  Of course as a backup she also took part, increasingly reluctantly, in the original alliance, but discovered that people respect running the alliance at more than playing along with the alliance, no matter how you spin it.
• Richard (Tagi) The first winner in Survivor history was cocky enough to say he would be in the first episode, and I agreed, because it was obvious that he was there to play and no one else was.  He started out being abrasive to his tribe, but wisely backed off and did what was necessary to ensure his survival, and that didn't mean that he would be the best around camp or at challenges, but rather in the social game, in which he formed the original alliance around himself.