But in a way the genius of "Survivor" is that it almost doesn't matter how manipulated the characters are. It's hard to shake the reality TV jones. There's something intriguing about watching the players -- ambitious and conflicted but nonetheless "real" people -- interact. It is perhaps one of "Survivor's" secrets that, in an age in which convenience-store clerks who've slept with their aunts jockey to tell their stories on daytime television, it has a built-in mechanism to factor out posturing.

The contestants are thrown into adversity and immediately weakened by exertion, stress, exposure and lack of food. (In the static and boring "Big Brother" household, by contrast, the contestants never forgot they were on camera.)

The show can be cruel. As we saw in the reunion show that aired after this year's finale, Deb, the contestant briskly dismissed on the first show, found the experience -- demonized, isolated, ejected and then made a pop-culture punchline -- wrenching. Inarticulate and shamed, she didn't even want to even appear on the reunion and could do little but cry.

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And we never did find out what made Keith so dislikable. What did he do to people, anyway? Sure, he was a little arrogant at times, maybe proud, but "Survivor" cameras capture contestants doing all sorts of seriously unattractive things and not one ever produced a smoking gun for Keith.

Yet neither seems to have been treated unfairly. Deb's very inability to explain herself spoke volumes, and Keith, well, it seems to be Keith's curse that he comes across as a noodge. He might not like it that his kids see him treated as a pariah on national television, but then he didn't have to try to win a million dollars on a national TV show, did he?

In other words, the show seemed to be capturing something close to, well, reality.

Consider Colby. He made it plain he was there to play to win, as he told us again and again. All of Colby's determination to "play the game" set us up to believe he'd calmly jettison Tina when he had to.

Yet it turned out there were reservoirs of commitment in Colby to a melange of very abstract ideas -- personal worth, karma, cosmic chance -- that, while they caught us off guard, were not inconsistent, in the end, with the man the show had presented us.

While I'm sure that the vaguely differentiated mass of American television sitcoms and dramas I can't bear to watch occasionally touch, sometimes professionally, on themes like these, I doubt they are presented in quite so slicing and, yet, ambiguous, a fashion.

Why, in the end, did Colby jettison Keith? Because he liked Tina better? (A million dollars better?) Because he didn't want to be seen as a person who would jettison a nice person like Tina? (Despite his repeated assertions that he was exactly that kind of a person?)

Because his animosity for Keith ran that deep? Because he'd seen too many Clint Eastwood movies?

Did you watch "Survivor" closely and ridicule his Texas stolidity? Did you hoot at his flirtations with Jerri, until, George W. Bush-like, he got himself back on track and focused on accepting his destiny? And would you have bet cash money he'd apologetically but determinedly leverage Keith as his best chance to win?

Me, too. Colby's no Sydney Carton, and yet in the end he did a far, far better thing than we expected him to do. It says something, in the end, about Colby, and maybe something about the people watching, that we expected the worst from him and yet he couldn't bring himself to give it to us.

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