It Was Nice To See Nick Turani Angry!

The Viva La Stool account posting this clip showing Nick Turani in a bad mood

Who woulda thunk it, Nick can get angry and blow up and say mean things just like the rest of us! I personally LOVED seeing this out of Turani and wish we saw more of it! 

I love Nick. I'm the best man in his wedding. And there's a reason he's universally beloved by stoolies and very beloved internally as well. But he's also done such an amazing job crafting his image that when you see the above clip, you're sort of taken aback. And then you have to remember he's a real person with real emotions just like the rest of us. And he felt viciously betrayed by Nicky Smokes in Surviving Barstool, and let his emotions come out, on camera. Seeing ol' Turani angry and bitter like that is like seeing Halley’s Comet, a true "where were you?" moment. 

But guess what? We're all emotional here! Especially when playing a game with your friends where the objective is to backstab your way to $250,000. It would be insane if Turani wasn't pissed off an emotional after getting voted out. He's spent a ton of his own personal agency being a great friend to many people including Nicky Smokes, only to be stabbed in the back. But that's the fun dynamic of this game, isn't it? Do friendships exist in the game? Where is the line? Did Nicky Smokes actually do something wrong by voting out a friend…and should that roll over into real life?

I find the dynamics of Surviving Barstool to be so fascinating.

From this clip alone, we have:

1) Nick crashes out 100% on Nicky Smokes while Tate gets off scot free. 

2) Did Tate come clean to Nick T between filming and this airing? 

3) The vagueness of if Dana did or didn't have an idol kinda causing this entire thing. 

4) How angry Nick was irl. Kinda nice to see him be so mad! Let the anger out! 

5) The fine line between "it's a game" and "this is real life" with the $250k on the line. 

Hopefully the two Nicks are cool again…in the grand scheme of things there were still 14 people left when this happened. To us it happened in episode 2 with spillover into episode 3…to them Nick was in the game for 6 hours. Which makes you think about the "real" Survivor and how much downtime they have on an island with nothing to do but overthink. Also we get full hour long episodes out of 3 hours worth of real time…Survivor somehow edits 2 days into 1 hour. Crazy.

So I'll say this- if you're someone who can't believe this crashout, it's not that hard to believe. It's a stressful game in an intense environment and things get said that you later regret. It was just shocking to see it from Nick, is all. But hopefully this opens up the floodgates and we get more of it! More real anger, please!

PS: I played this game for 24 hours a couple seasons ago and couldn't believe how intense and stressful it was. Much more than I imagined it would be, and in retrospect I had no idea what was going on. 

Catch up on Surviving Barstool before episode 4 on Sunday!