2024-09-19 16:40:03
Season 47 of Survivor premieres tonight. You’d think I’d be excited; over the past nine months, I have watched all 46 seasons of the show—or, to slice it up differently, more than 600 episodes and 500-odd hours of host and showrunner Jeff Probst yelling at people as they navigate through mud and ropes courses; criticizing players as they mess up their timing with the Simmotion (possibly my favorite Survivor invention); encouraging them as they eat balut, and chastising them as they gag (“You gotta keep it down!”).
I couldn’t stop watching. Survivor was both exhilarating and comforting, a formula of a show with just enough unpredictability to be addictive, and the occasional cast member to absolutely fall for. (I howled in pain when professional wrestler and erstwhile geologist John Hennigan was ousted in Season 37; my daughter ran into my bedroom to make sure I hadn’t hurt myself.) Some seasons are more fun to watch than others, but even the objectively boring ones offer plenty to debate with fellow Survivor heads. I don’t know if I qualify as a “superfan”—the show’s parlance for “students” of the game, who spend copious amounts of free time not only watching the show but studying the challenges and strategy of the winningest players—but there is no question that I’m a devotee.
Which makes it all the more shocking that I may forgo this new season to tune in on Wednesdays to The Golden Bachelorette instead. After 46 seasons, I’m borderline ready to throw in the towel on this series. Not because I’ve had enough, but because I can’t take what Survivor has become: little more than Outward Bound for adults.
If you were a total Survivor newbie who started your initiation with a recent season, you might be surprised by how downright enlightened the show seems, given its cutthroat, grueling, and mud-spattered reputation. I certainly was. I started with 45. (Seasons used to be identified by location or theme, like “Nicaragua” or “Heroes vs. Villains,” as both varied; today all seasons are shot in Fiji and are identified solely, coldly by number.) On 45, which premiered about a year ago, the cast members seemed pretty nice and were a well-rounded and attractive group from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. There was a lot of collaboration, and even a showmance that everyone was into! It was great when Dee won; her show-squeeze Austin, who came in second, was happy for her. (Somewhat surprisingly to me, the showmance died among rumors that Dee hooked up with a winner from a previous Survivor season.) Julie, a woman in her late 40s, made it far in the game! Everyone felt pretty good!
You know what did make for good Survivor? Surviving.
But as I worked my way through the back catalog, I realized what was missing from 45: Probst’s yelling; his critical, occasionally harsh, game-time calling of every challenge; praising the bold and chastising the slow; his open disdain for quitters. In earlier seasons, he was narrating reality, with appropriate enthusiasm for dynamic players and without much sympathy for the struggling. He called the facts. Often, the buff guy was killing, say, the ring toss. But just as often, the skinny girl dominated the balance challenge, the nerd solved the puzzle, the middle-aged lady with the secret biceps kept her arm up over her head the longest. (Yes, keeping one arm above your head is a challenge, and it’s harder than it looks.) Every once in a while you got a player like Rob Mariano, aka “Boston Rob,” who was actually good at every single thing Survivor threw at him. A unicorn.
When Probst yells now, it’s to encourage. Lagging competitors in old seasons could expect some ridicule (“And Sally’s in dead last … again!”) where today’s players get shouts of support (“Sally may be in last, but she’s still fighting!”). Every time I hear him shout “Let’s get it on!”—the new-era replacement for his 40-season cry of “C’mon in, guys!,” a greeting that in 2021 was deemed too gendered—I perceptibly wince. At tribal council, Probst frequently asks players about their feelings; instead of revolving around the moment of judgment, these episode-ending discussions have become sharing circles during which players air past traumas and discuss how proud they are of themselves for, say, navigating a maze while blindfolded. There is a lot of talk of proving things to oneself while Probst grins along maniacally, his incredible dimples working overtime. He’s starting to seem like a wellness guru, offering Survivor as a path to healing all wounds, from being too skinny or dorky or socially awkward or strategic or beefy—too anything! There is a lot of crying and hugging and comforting and affirming. I am not against therapy or wellness or kindness, but let’s be real: It just doesn’t make for good Survivor.
You know what did make for good Survivor? Surviving. I used to dread the drenching rains across Central America and the Pacific alike that sent players into despair for days, their toes shriveled and gray, their shoes like wearable swamps. Now I pray for them, so that something actually related to surviving happens on this show.
Still, let me acknowledge that the old Survivor, which first aired in 2000, was filled with absolutely nightmarish, unacceptable racism, sexism, and ableism. We’ll start with the racism, both casual and extremely explicit, like this tirade at the final tribal council against the three Black finalists in Season 14. Then, the sexism. I watched two women on separate seasons have absolute, screaming-into-the-void meltdowns after being assaulted by male castmates and gaslit about what had happened. I am still reeling from the young-women-on-older-women hate in Season 6 (“The Amazon”) and the absolute disdain for the show’s first deaf player. There was also a season with a handsy middle-aged male cast member who was removed from the show only after he had an incident with a female producer. (The female contestants who were suffering his crap could have voted him out but didn’t because he “wasn’t a threat”; in a stark example of the ruthlessness the show inspired, they judged that enduring his unwanted touches and voting him out later was better for their game). A trans player was outed in Season 34 (“Game Changers”); he handled it with more grace than anyone should even possess, while the out-er is still trying, and failing, to fix his reputation.
It is to the credit of Black former cast members, who put pressure on CBS and Probst to clean up the show and diversify the cast, that unacceptable events like these don’t happen on today’s Survivor. But in his efforts to bring the show into the 2020s, Probst has gone too far. Survivor used to be a kind of double entendre: You had to survive the island, the elements, the challenges, and the people, who, for better or worse, were a much more accurate and challenging cross section of this crazy, mixed-up country. Lots of farmers from the South, lawyers from the North, moms from the Midwest, and the occasional NFL player, ’80s starlet, or firefighter. Clashes were unavoidable, but unlikely friendships—genuinely charming ones—took root too. Today a more peaceful and curated experience is also a more self-congratulatory one.
I’m not the first to note being disheartened with the new era or disenchanted with Probst. New York magazine called for him to be fired at the end of Season 46, and writer Mark Harris explained why even that wouldn’t be enough to fix the show. Too much has been lost since Season 40—aka “Winners at War,” in which 20 previous Survivor victors competed for the second, third, fourth, and even fifth time—the last to air before the new era of the series. Instead of food challenges, we now have weird game tokens and trickery; instead of shelter building, we have infinite conversations about “strategy.” Final tribal councils, which used to be filled with pointed, difficult, and even mean questions and remarks from ousted players, have been replaced with vague open forums for meandering commentary. Tribe swaps, which mixed up alliances and switched up winners and losers at pivotal moments, are gone. Live reunion shows, when we get to see everyone in their finery and relive (and relitigate) highs and lows? Dead.
But perhaps the biggest loss has been the family visit. “Winners at War” was the last to feature a family-visit episode, a late-in-the-season Survivor staple going way back, when players got to connect with someone from home. This was the eleventh-hour reward for folks who made it far in the game, and it was a reliable, and genuine, tearjerker. It was the players’ reward, and ours too: a break from the formula, when even the most intense players let their guards down. Twenty years ago, family visits took place via video messages and live chats on jewel-toned iMacs. Later on, with Survivor’s success and the big bucks secured, select loved ones—sisters, dads, cousins, moms, besties—were flown into that season’s remote location to provide a needed boost of moral support to propel players to the end. Season 40 did it big: Entire families were brought to the island, for every contestant. Toddlers born to Survivor players who had gotten married played in the sand. Kids who were babies on video screens in the early aughts showed up in person, grown up and beautiful. The players we’d rooted for and against—older, puffier, realer—relaxed for a few hours, enjoying the island, letting the game go. Reality arrived, without gameplay, to reality TV.
To me, every great thing about Survivor culminated in those few minutes of air—something fleeting yet transformative, bonding and beautiful, entertaining yet somehow real. It sounds sappy, and it was. I loved every single family visit. These were moments when every player, whether a “hero” or a “villain,” a “David” or a “Goliath,” was a regular person again. Viewers cared because we’d spent real time watching them suffer, banter, starve, and win. Now the game’s too short—26 days instead of 39—and the players are like outlines we’re rushing, and failing, to fill in. It’s impossible to remember all of them, let alone get attached. I don’t know what anyone is good at, what their strengths are, even if I know all about their much-talked-about anxieties and insecurities. I struggle to decide who I even want to get the million at the end.
I’m not ready to join the call for Probst’s head just yet, but I may need to take a break from Survivor, at least until Season 50, when the cast will once again be filled with returning players—hopefully from the earliest seasons, accustomed to a different, better version of the show. We were promised a new era, but I miss the old Survivor, and the old Jeff Probst, who loved the game more than the sound of his own voice, shouting words of encouragement across the muck.
