Two Women are Responsible For Changing ‘Survivor’ For the Better

The Big Picture

• Vecepia Towery and Maryanne Oketch, the only two black women to win Survivor, broke barriers and dominated the game with their strategies and identities.
• Vecepia masterfully utilized her affability and strategic prowess, while Maryanne proved that being proudly odd and positive can lead to success.
• These women changed Survivor by speaking openly about their experiences as black women and shedding light on the series’ lack of racial diversity.

A truly historic series, few other reality television shows have offered audiences as many iconic moments as Survivor has. Created by Charlie Parsons for CBS more than two decades ago, this competition maroons a group of strangers in the wilderness together and tasks them to survive the elements and each other. The last one standing wins $1,000,000 and the title of ‘Sole Survivor’. It’s these winning sole survivors who have given viewers some of the program’s best moments, the winners’ pantheon filled with icons who have helped define so much of what makes the show great. Yet despite this, a prominent issue has been the lack of diversity in the show as a whole. This a problem it has attempted to remedy by casting more people of color in recent seasons, but has left its winners’ circle lacking many identities.

With these odds stacked against them, the two women overcame this unfair setting to dominate their game: Vecepia Towery and Maryanne Oketch. They are the only two black women to ever win Survivor. They each broke barriers not only because of their identities but for the ways they spoke on the issues they faced as women of color and employed innovative game styles to win each of their seasons. They are true revolutionaries of this landmark program, and it’s about time they’re appreciated for just how impactful their time on the game was.

Vecepia’s Method to Winning ‘Survivor’ Was Staying Calm

The first few seasons of Survivor were a period of the show that saw the origin of many game styles and strategies modern players still try to emulate. Even so, when Vecepia Towery was first introduced to audiences back in season four, Survivor: Marquesas, she exhibited a much calmer personality than most viewers had come to expect from their winners. Never conniving or explicitly sly, Vecepia stayed cool and collected enough to shift among the existing alliances, always ensuring the safety of herself and her best friend Sean Rector. While this may seem a necessity of the game now, she was the first person of her time to ever master this tactic, and she did it all with a pleasant, slightly goofy attitude that left people unaware she was playing them until it was too late. This helped her secure a spot in the top four where, in a historic move still spoken about to this day, Vecepia’s diligent note-taking of her fellow player’s lives in the journal she was allowed on the island led her to win an immunity challenge when every other player had their target set on her. That secured her top three, her kind and gentle personality got her to the top two, and finally, it was there that she won the entire season and became the first Black person to ever win Survivor.

Vecepia’s time in the game is a masterclass in utilizing your natural affability to sway people to your side. She allowed others to perceive her as a sweet woman who was always in an alliance but never the leader of one, not realizing what a threat she truly was until they were being sent out of the competition. She maneuvered with absolute grace, and along with this strategic prowess, her close relationship with Sean gave Vecepia a chance to speak about why it’s so important people with minority identities are featured on shows like this, a lesson that many reality TV shows desperately needed to learn. Even when she was backstabbing others to get ahead in the game, Vecepia was always a genuine and warm personality who wore her identity proudly, never allowing others’ thoughts to make her second guess herself or make her question her place in the game – some traits that would be shared by another certain player more than 35 seasons later.

Maryanne Oketch Proved Authenticity Can Win ‘Survivor’

While the wait was unbearable, Survivor finally saw another Black woman grab herself a win with the lovable and ever-positive Maryanne Oketch. She came onto her season proclaiming herself as weird and set out to show everyone watching that you could be your proudly odd self and still master an arena like this one. Placed onto a tribe with physical and strategic powerhouses who didn’t consider her a serious contender, her time on the show was a true evolution as the young woman learned that she had to fend for herself in this setting, a self-reliance that she openly stated she’s had trouble finding in her own life. Once she hit this stride, though, Maryanne truly began to thrive, getting herself an extra vote advantage, finding a hidden immunity idol, and orchestrating one of the biggest blindsides of the modern era with the vote-out of Omar Zaheer. She did all of this with her signature peppy attitude and loud laugh, her positivity helping her to the final three where her beautiful final speech got her the win.

Similar to Vecepia, Maryanne wore all of herself proudly and never gave in to the blatant judgment of those around her. She was open about her emotions yet never let the stress of the situation get her down – in fact, she capitalized on it and the misconceptions others had of her being an innocent (if awkward) girl to strategically outlast all of her competition. Even more, though, Maryanne had one of the most consequential scenes in the entire series when she and fellow player Andrea ‘Drea’ Wheeler spoke about race and their experience playing Survivor as Black women. Maryanne especially emphasized how the program is a microcosm of the outside, which meant people brought in their own biases, making it harder for players with marginalized identities like her discrimination, as they must navigate around these discriminations along with every other strategic play coming their way. She discussed the show’s fandom and how it unfairly treats Black contestants, the constant routine of Black players being voted out one after another, and overall spoke to the important racial issue that has persisted through the series’ entire run but was never so openly discussed. Maryanne is a truly groundbreaking Survivor player, someone who showed that you can be exactly who you are and still win the game. She used her time on this platform to speak about important issues everyone watching needed to hear.

These Women Changed ‘Survivor’

Winning Survivor is one of the hardest reality TV achievements, and it’s even more difficult when you know the odds are against you and that there has only been one – or no other – person with your identity to have won before. Maryanne Oketch and Vecepia Towery are historical players whose styles of gameplay spoke to never giving up who you are to please others, and that a surefire way of thriving in this game is having pride in yourself and using that confidence to your advantage. It is deeply, deeply unfortunate that Survivor has only had two black women ever win, and it speaks to a long issue regarding racial diversity that the series is still trying to fix. Yet this knowledge didn’t slow these women down and they both dominated, Vecepia especially deserving praise for being the first to implement ingenious strategies that are still practiced by new winners to this day. They won while speaking about their identities and bringing some much-needed inspiration to the countless watchers who needed to see someone like them thrive to believe they could as well. They are truly inspirational and monumental icons of reality television, and it’s safe to say that they changed Survivor for the better.

Survivor is Available to Stream on Paramount Plus in the U.S.

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