Michael Hides Accident From Family
Credit: USA Today
A Survivor contestant removed from the show after seriously burning his hands in a campfire says his family never learned the nature of his injuries until they watched the incident on TV Thursday night. Michael Skupin, a 38-year-old software publisher from White Lake, Mich., inhaled smoke, fainted and fell into a fire, suffering second-degree burns on both hands during production of Survivor in October.
Paramedics airlifted Skupin by helicopter to hospital burn units, where he narrowly avoided surgery. He was treated for two weeks and released.
Only the aftermath — not the accident itself — was shown on the program, and executive producer Mark Burnett refused to say whether cameras captured it. The contestant immediately ran to a nearby river to cool his hands, and later footage showed strips of skin dangling from them. But Burnett said he avoided using "much more graphic footage of agony and blood and blisters and pus" because "that has no place in the 8 o'clock hour."
Skupin, who had earlier killed a wild pig for his Kucha tribe, leading animal-rights groups to protest the show, says he fully expected to return to the game after being treated, and has since regained full use of his hands. But both a staff physician and Burnett decided that the extent of his injuries and the length of treatment made that impossible.
"Had he come back in two days, we would have allowed him" to return to the show, Burnett says. "Someone can't be away more than that, because it changes the dynamics of the game."
But Skupin kept the story behind his bandaged hands from his three children and his wife, Peni, who "was sure that I won when I came home," honoring a confidentiality agreement.
The incident, aired during Survivor's sixth episode, marked the first time that a contestant has been removed from the show without being voted off in "tribal council," and the first injury on the reality-based show, in which 16 people vie for $1 million in the Australian outback.
The show canceled a planned "immunity challenge," saving it for future episodes. Burnett did stage a symbolic tribal council but chose not to air it. "I think it was cathartic for the Kucha tribe members, but when I looked at it, it was meaningless for television and almost belittled what had happened."
Skupin's removal ensured that the Kucha and Ogakor tribes would be evenly represented, with five contestants apiece, with a scheduled merger of the teams that takes place in the next episode.
Interest in the expected injury, coupled with a Friends repeat on NBC, helped deliver the second edition of Survivor its largest audience — 31.3 million viewers — since the post-Super Bowl premiere, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings.
