User blog comment:JERealize/Announcing DSD/@comment-5424252-20150803101555/@comment-1874924-20150806135348

From the sound of it, I doubt I would have liked TD America. I'm not a fan of team swaps and suchlike in competition stories. A single, small swap is fine; but without a TV show's visual cues, multiple or large-scale swaps can make it very difficult for the reader to keep everyone's team assignments straight.

As for keeping yourself and your ideas in check, that's far more critical in a TV show than in a written story because a TV show requires episodes of a fixed length.

One thing that does sound interesting in your DSD proposal is having only the challenge laggards face elimination. Last year, there was a short (10 episodes) show called The Quest, with a fantasy setting and billed as "an elimination game with a storyline", that Wifey and I both liked. There were no set teams, although some challenges had ad hoc teams. After each challenge, the three players who fared worst had to face elimination, determined by a vote of their fellows. This setup made for a very different social dynamic than Survivor and its imitators. Simply put, you can't play such games the way you would play Survivor, and the one Quest player who tried to do so quickly got the boot.