Survivor flopping wouldn't have changed a thing. Reality TV was still going to take off; just look at Big Brother in Britain, which debuted around the same time. It was really a matter of when a network executive was going to stumble upon a winning formula for a reality show, not if. To kill reality TV, you'd have to go at least all the way back to The Real World on MTV in 1992. That was the show that pretty much invented modern reality TV as we know it. Arguably, you'd have to go all the way back to the '70s and prevent An American Family and the Chuck Barris shows (The Gong Show, The Newlywed Game, etc.) from ever airing. Survivor didn't invent reality TV, it just proved that there was a huge audience for it.