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Dr. Sean Kenniff ’91 was disillusioned with what he calls “the business of medicine.” Three days after giving notice that he would leave his clinical practice on Long Island, he happened upon a magazine article about the upcoming CBS reality series Survivor and resolved to get on the show.
Kenniff, 31, a neurologist who earned his biology degree at Binghamton University, wanted to pursue his long-standing goal of dispensing medical advice to millions via television. Survivor could be his ticket to stardom – or at least, to notoriety.
Kenniff was one of 32,000 Americans who downloaded an application form off the Survivor website. Only 7,000, including Kenniff, actually submitted the application with the required videotape of themselves to CBS.
“My tape showed me spazzing out in the shower. I collected the dirty water and drank it. I ate hair out of the drain,” he told a crow
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Survivor Sean Kenniff signs an autograph for School of Management student Howie Daub as the event is recorded by a camerman from WBNG-TV. |
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d of about 500 in the Anderson Center Concert Theater on November 20, during a day-long campus visit sponsored by several University offices.
That tape earned Kenniff and 800 others invitations to Los Angeles for a live audition. The contestants were asked an extensive series of questions designed to gauge their psychological health. Then they were asked whether they would consider having sex with a fellow castaway on a remote jungle island. “Of course!” Kenniff replied.
Each semifinalist was isolated for 15 minutes in a room with two cameras. Kenniff said he knew he had to convince the producers that he could best fill the role they considered assigning him – the “All-American Nice Guy/Dork.”
“We’re not actors, but they went out to that pool of 7,000 and found people who fit the roles they had created,” Kenniff said of the show’s producers. Alone with the cameras, he did the “YMCA dance,” a striptease, played with his nipple rings and other similar antics.
He made the cut and was one of 16 chosen to spend 39 days on the remote island of Pulau Tiga, near Malaysia. Each contestant was allotted two bowls of rice a day and assigned to one of two “tribes.” The tribes had to build their own shelters, find water and start their own fires, and perform in competitions that would both benefit their tribe and give them temporary immunity from banishment.
Temperatures on Pulau Tiga ranged from 96 degrees to a high of 116, Kenniff said. It rained every day, and a tropical storm once pounded the island with 60 mph winds. Venomous snakes, palm-sized insects with a taste for human flesh, and thousands of rats infested the terrain. Kenniff received more than 10 rat bites during his stint on the island.
Kenniff said he lost 10 pounds before the show began, and living on a diet of mostly bugs, rats and small stingrays, lost 27 more on Pulau Tiga. “It was so much harder than they led the public to believe, in terms of survival.”
Each twice-weekly trip to a “tribal council” required a two-hour hike through the jungle, up and down nine steep hills and ravines while carrying lit kerosene torches, Kenniff said. Once, 72-year-old Rudy Boesch, a former Navy SEAL, tripped and fell into a thicket of pinkie-sized thorns which Kenniff had to pick out of his skull.
Only one survived the environmental hardships and the frequent votes to claim the $1 million prize. Kenniff, who became known for his “alphabet strategy” of voting people off, lasted until Day 36.
Kenniff said his plan was unfairly portrayed as naïve and bumbling by the show’s producers. “It was much more deliberate and sinister than you realize,” he said. “It made great sense — it was very sophisticated, and it worked.”
By voting alphabetically by the contestant’s last name and telling his island mates how he was voting, Kenniff said he was able to get people who feared banishment to “stack” their votes on his. For instance, if castaway Susan Hawk believed two people would vote to banish her, she could vote for the same person Kenniff planned to vote for and thereby neutralize the threat. He said this plan allowed him to reach Day 30 without a single vote for banishment and to last longer than he would have if he’d joined the infamous “alliance.”
Kenniff said he was fully aware of the existence of the alliance, which was formed by four members of his tribe to systematically banish everyone they felt had a chance to win.
The eventual winner, Richard Hatch, was a gay corporate trainer from Rhode Island with a penchant for walking around naked, an aptitude for spearfishing, and an unnerving ability to make people dance to his tune.
“Hatch was smart enough not only to set up the alliance,” Kenniff said, “but to do it with the three people who were as abrasive as he was…people who individually would have been kicked off the island a long time ago.”
Kenniff said he remains good friends with most of the castaways, in particular Hatch and Gervase Peterson, a youth basketball coach from Philadelphia.
And Survivor has, after all, launched Keniff toward his dream career. He’s landed spots as a medical correspondent on Extra, a television news tabloid, and on Live with Regis. He has a recurring role on daytime’s Guiding Light and has appeared on such prime time shows as Nash Bridges. He is a spokesman for Columbia University Hospital’s brain tumor research facility and plans to join CBS in a joint venture to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis Society and the American Cancer Society. And he’s negotiating for publication of his novel, Skitzo, a thriller. |
