10 Shameless Attempts By TV Shows To Boost Their Ratings
4. Survivor Separated Contestants By Ethnicity
Survivor is a reality TV series which strands a collection of strangers in an isolated location and pits them against differing challenges, such as finding food, water and shelter, gradually eliminating players until there is only one person left.
Over the course of the show's run there have been dozens of variations, one of which was Survivor: Cook Islands. In the run up to Cook Islands, which premiered in September 2006, it was announced that - unlike the previous seasons - contestants would be separated by ethnicity.
This generated a huge amount of discussion and controversy, as various media outlets and the general public debated whether or not such an act was racist. The resulting controversy attracted almost twenty million viewers to the show's premiere, and numbers remained high throughout the season, even when the teams were eventually brought together and mixed.