I Survived is a docuseries that aired from 2008 to 2015. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a series about people sharing stories about times they nearly died. They follow a pretty standard formula of 3 stories per episodenote , which are some combination of crimes, natural disasters, and/or accidents. The series generally tried to have stories from at least two different categories as well as ensuring that any in the same category have substantially different details, presumably so that audiences would be less prone to get confused about which details corresponded to which story; the exception was the specials focused around a particular event (e.g. 9/11, the Virginia Tech shooting, Hurricane Sandy) or topic (eg. cults, crimes of passion), which naturally involved stories with more similarities.
The show contains examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: Some of the subjects lose limbs in their ordeals. Most of these are in cases with accidental causes, but one episode features a victim who had her arms intentionally cut off before her attacker left her for dead, assuming she'd bleed out before anyone would find her.
- Bad Samaritan:
- Sharon was shot while driving, but managed to stop her car and alert a passing motorist. He promised to take her to the hospital, but she was soon horrified to realize that he was her assailant.
- Arkesha is attacked and raped by two men, but manages to escape from them, only for the first person she encounters to be a scumbag who also rapes her.
- Bittersweet Ending: If a story features two or more people enduring a horrible ordeal, very often only one of them has survived while the others haven't. This is often foreshadowed by the fact that only one person is telling the story. The survivors themselves are often left permanently disfigured or disabled from their experience.
- Body Horror: Viewers often get pretty graphic descriptions of what happened to someone in the course of their ordeal. In particular, Thad, who's kidnapper broke all of the bones in his legs.
- Dirty Coward: One episode has a girl who was kidnapped for 10 years as a sex slave. When she's rescued, the kidnapper is pathetically apologizing nonstop during the trial.
- Domestic Abuse: A significant amount of female victims describe being attacked by their husbands or boyfriends or exes.
- Extra-Long Episode: The 9/11 episode was 90 minutes and had no commercial breaks.
- Good Samaritan:
- In the Cult special, a young man being baptized in the church notices that a girl (Elishah, the narrator) looks despondent and forms a friendship with her in hopes of helping her. Eventually he learns that she's being violently abused within the cult and makes a plan to help her escape.
- A woman injured in the Haitian earthquake survived in large part because the locals helped get her to a medical facility.
- I Hate Past Me: One victim relays a story of a man who kidnapped him and tried to impale him with a crucifix, believing he was possessed by a demon. 12 years later, he runs into the man after he gets released from the mental hospital he was sent to. The attacker apologizes and is ashamed of how he acted since he had untreated mental health issues. In one of the most touching moments in the entire show, he forgives him and is grateful the man got the help he needed.
- I Have a Family: When describing how he and his friend Michael were abducted by a carjacker, Scott tearfully recalls him trying to invoke this trope before being fatally shot by the assailant.
- It Began with a Twist of Fate:Numerous episodes include subjects whose ordeals were the result of accidents or natural disasters rather than criminal acts. Even among those who were crime victims, not all were specifically targeted by someone they knew; many were simply unfortunate enough to cross paths with an opportunistic criminal, and still others just happened to be at the site of a mass casualty event (such as a school shooting or terrorist attack).
- Imperiled in Pregnancy: One pregnant woman had her legs crushed in a processing machine (but miraculously gave birth to a healthy baby months later). Two episodes center around women attacked by deranged women who wanted to steal their babies. Yet another was viciously stabbed by an assailant after pulling into a rest stop to get a soda.
- Life-or-Limb Decision: Jonathan, whose arm became trapped behind his boiler when he tried to clean it, realized that not only was he going to die if he didn't cut his arm off, so was his pet beagle Portia, who was wandering around upstairs and starving. Fortunately, the police and an ambulance were converging on his house by this point (alerted by his coworkers worried about why he hadn't been at work. Although his arm ultimately needed to be amputated, both he and Portia lived).
- Little Miss Badass: And "Mr." Several stories told by adults are of horrific ordeals that they endured as children,
- Matricide: Erin Caffey murdered her mother, her two siblings, and nearly her father, and burned the house down to the foundation to run away with her boyfriend.
- Moral Myopia: In the Erin Caffey case, a hired hand was given 2000 bucks, which he was planning to use to get custody of his kids, never mind the fact he murdered another family to do so and set a horrendous example for his own children.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: One story is about a man who bravely saved Allentown, Pennsylvania, from a barreling train ready to blow up toxic explosive chemicals. He stops the train, but in the process, he sustains permanent brain damage. Several other people became crime/accident victims by trying to help someone.
- Out-of-Character Alert: When a woman's husband broke into her home and threatened her, she managed to convince him to let her call a friend to cancel their plans to shopping. Although her friend was initially confused because they DIDN'T have any such plans, she quickly realized that something was wrong and called 911.
- Rape as Drama: The majority of female crime victims describe being raped at some point in their ordeal and this has happened to several men as well—David, Martin.
- Ripped from the Headlines: Occasionally, stories of those who'd survived infamous events such as the Virginia Tech shooting
, the Haiti earthquake, etc., were featured. - Survival Mantra: Employed by a lot of people. Debbie, for example, recited the 23rd Psalm during her rape to distract herself.
- Very Special Episode: A few episodes focused on one event—9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and the Norway terrorist attack.
- Where Are They Now: The segments always end with footnotes on the person's recovery and whether or not their attacker(s) were convicted.
- Would Hurt a Child: A significant amount of stories are told by adults about ordeals they endured as children.
