Owen won canonically, by the way.
>>53715
Have you ever watched a reality TV show or a survival gameshow? It's like that, but with none of the ugly real people or the constraints of realism. It's Survivor with high school teen drama, and it's a cartoon. Reality TV and gameshows were
big at the time because writers kept getting uppity and striking, something that eventually forced the creation of "prestige TV".
For context, the average person, enjoying the wealth of the War on Terror, could sit down and watch people who would be archetypal freaks in their home towns fight each other for money, live lavishly, etc. It was like wrestling for normal people. This is how shows like Survivor became so popular. They were cheap to make, only required people who would act like slaves for the hope of money, filled timeslots, and, most importantly, were
character focused. Being on one of these shows often made people small-time celebrities as long as the show was popular enough.
As the reality TV craze was growing in the early 2000s, an idea came to create a show for tweens that would parody reality TV and gameshows. Its format and character-driven nature would drive kids back to watching cartoons, since they were already watching reality TV in droves, and it would be easy to sell to Americans, given that Total Drama Island is a Canadian production, and as such easy to sell overseas, since it could bill itself as being American. Thus, at the cusp of the Great Recession, Total Drama Island was born from the prior concept of "Camp TV," and it recycled voice actors from a previous production, one which mimicked teen-focused TV dramas, 6teen.
>TL;DR
It's a fun, cheap, character focused show you can watch while cheering on your favorite teen with exaggerated proportions and an archetypal personality.