How Parker Saved SOTF-TV

[Frozen Smoke]

[Article published on syndica.tv on the 18th of December, 2020]

How Parker Saved SOTF-TV

Brandon Parker is one of the most reviled winners of SOTF. He earns this title not for his brutality or deviousness, or even his luck, but for how obscenely boring he was to watch—and how undeserved his victory felt to all those who'd watched him cower as his friends died around him. These critiques are well known, and coupled with him setting a pattern of how kids with zero applicable skills can meander their way to the endgame, we have the unusual case of his coining a word: "Parkering." The term went from a non-thing to the Oxford Dictionary addition in about five years. And it caught on—I'm sure those of us who go to one of the big viewing parties like the one in O2 Arena will recall it being used as an insult in the pub crawl through London that followed, with those refusing drinks being told to "stop Parkering IRL."

Today, I'm going to lay down an alternate viewpoint, though. I will argue that without Parker we wouldn't have SOTF-TV.

Now, this needs some context, but you have to remember what the highlight reel, big budget media was like before SOTF. It was all designed to push the buttons we get pushed every season, providing familiar archetypes people could latch onto. Look at Game of Thrones (a surprisingly good watch, even though it was cancelled in the fourth season) as an example: it was lauded for its ability to eschew the normal good-guy, bad-guy fantasy and replace it with something more morally grey. And then in the end you have The Chosen One riding a Magical Dragon fighting Hordes of Undead, which is about as morally complex as a minestrone soup. That's what everyone expects when they turn on their TV, that everything makes sense at the end.

Then along comes SOTF, Season 1. Suddenly every character on the screen is a fucking mess, especially as this was the first time and no-one had thought this was even a possibility. You remember what it was like in S1, all the crying and begging, but spotting the few who knew what they had to do grimly cutting their way through the cast. It was a slow burn, and it let these… "characters" develop into a coherent storyline, or what you could pick out as one. You felt comfortable with it, seeing the heroes and villains self-identify and take their roles on that bloody stage. It was violent and disturbing, seeing entertainment this hyper-real, but we could accept it as it fit our cultural understanding of what happens when the rules go away.

The crescendo of this was the finalé. We all thought we knew how it was going to go; the archetypes and roles were shockingly clear. The Useless Kid, The Hero, and The Villain. Everyone knows how that story plays out: Hero reasons with Villain because he believes in humanity being good, Villain shoots Useless Kid to prove his Villainy, Hero is sad and takes Villain out. It's what everyone expected.

And then we all watched, our jaws on the floor, as Useless Kid seemed to destroy the fabric of reality, and stumbled ass-backwards into survival for no good reason, his allies all dead and the Villain as good as dead at his hands. It should have ruined it, the feeling of everyone's preconceptions being shattered like Jake shattered A.C's right arm in that final fight, but it didn't.

It broke every record that was basically ever set for viewership, and that final scene was played over and over to the point that I think more kids have seen that than the moon landing at this point, because it twisted the shard of jagged glass that SOTF came at your prefrontal cortex with. Life isn't a fucking story. If Jake or A.C. had won, that first season would have been good, but it wouldn't have shown us that this was all being left in the fickle hands of fate, free of some puppeteer's guidance. That was clear from the way the company treated it. The first cut of S1 didn't add more Parker footage than aired, how crazy is that? They focused on the A.C. & Jake fight until the very end, then blam. Parker even gets a lingering shot as he's pulled onto the 'copter to get out, just to drive the point home that, yes, he won. Him.

Since then we've seen as many twists as life can throw at us, with players, anti-players, heroes, villains and "survivors" all clawing their ways to the top of the body pile. But we'll never forget the fact that a coward won the first one, and showed us that there would never be any interference in the purity of the game. That simple foundation of truth—in my opinion—is why we're still watching it.

Joshua West
Author of Hypertrue: The Future of Entertainment