By FRAZIER MOORE
The Associated Press

NEW YORK - It’s here again. Gather around the television for the game everybody is waiting for.

“Survivor” is back, kicking off right after that football thing Sunday night.

As everybody knows, Super Bowl XXXV is just a warm-up act, a bloated prelude to “Survivor II,” where two teams of Type-A contenders will meet on the parched earth of northeastern Australia.

At hour’s end, the 16 contestants will become 15 when someone gets “voted off the tribe” (in the show’s current lingo). Then the show will move to its regular CBS time slot on Feb. 1 at 8 p.m. EST.

But while the tried-and-true format is the same, the TV world has changed.

When the original “Survivor” launched last May, so-called “reality TV” was already the craze - but also tainted, particularly after Fox’s “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” debacle three months earlier.

No “Survivor” review copies were made available (then, as now, security is tighter than Al Gore’s lockbox), so the show arrived on a wave of press coverage mostly dwelling on the weird, even sinister, premise.

No wonder CBS has signed-on for “Survivor” III and IV.

No wonder expectations for II are sky-high.

If not, CBS wouldn’t be pitting it against NBC powerhouse “Friends,” which for nearly a decade has owned the 8-to-8:30 p.m. slot.

And NBC wouldn’t be making this kooky counterstrike: stretching its hit sitcom by 10 minutes and rounding out the hour with new “Saturday Night Live” sketches.

“‘Survivor’ is certainly going to be a hit,” says Steve Sternberg, a senior partner at the advertising firm TN Media. “But when ‘Friends’ has original episodes, I think it’s certainly going to beat ‘Survivor.’”

The new players on the show - who include a Harvard Law School student, an Army intelligence officer and a couple of bartenders - are clearly a dishier bunch than before.