Well, after a break of I would say reasonable length, it is time to return to our off-season discussion content. And naturally, with the first thing I’m covering, the thing that is designed to bring back readers who may have tuned out during the off-season, I’m going with an incredibly niche topic that is likely non-controversial and interesting to few. Because I make good decisions!
In all seriousness, my reasoning for covering this topic merits some explanation. At the end of “Survivor 42”, I, like most fans, eagerly consumed the preview for the upcoming “Survivor 43”. It was an enjoyable preview; pretty standard on the surface, but fun. However, I did have a nagging thought that this preview seemed to have more cast members present in it than previous ones. Still, this was not enough on its own to merit further investigation, particularly since it might be a “just me” thing. Later on, though, reading around online and talking with fans myself, many people got a similar sentiment, and thus investigation seemed more warranted. To do this, though, I needed to rewatch every single season preview “Survivor” has ever produced, taking down relevant data on each so as to be able to compare the latest preview to those that came before. Entertaining enough, but even with such short subject matter (generally 1-2 minutes in length), that adds up over the course of 40+ seasons, so that’s over an hour of my life I can never get back. All this research mushroomed into a lot of patterns and factoids I felt might be fun to share with the readership, hence this blog. Or, to put it another way, I have spent over an hour of my life on this, and you will all now experience my findings with me, dang it!
Before we get to what makes the preview for “Survivor 43” different (and rest assured, there are some stark differences), we need to talk about how the season preview started out. As one might expect, the focus of the preview when it first came to light was not on the cast, or even the twists that the new season would bring, but instead on the location. The culture, the beauty of the land, and the difficulty of survival were the main things highlighted, if not the only things highlighted. One need only look at how the preview was introduced to recognize this. Rather than “Take a look at what’s coming next season” or similar language, the preview was usually brought up with “Take a look at where ‘Survivor’ is going next” or similar language. And, for the early days of the show, this should not be a surprise. Strange though it may seem now, in the early days, “Survivor” was pitched as a show about, well, actual survival. Not the elaborate strategy game we know and love today, the idea was that actual physical survival in the wilderness would be important, if not the driving factor of the game.
What MAY be a surprise is how long this method of hyping up the next season lasted. “Survivor” may have been initially pitched and marketed as a show about actual survival, but the social survival and strategy quickly came to dominate that perception, even in the eye of the public. The exact date the switch happened is unknown, and therefore up for debate (some might argue that it happened as early as halfway through “Survivor Borneo” with the Gretchen boot), but even being conservative, I feel like it would be hard to argue that the focus of “Survivor” was on literal survival post “Survivor The Amazon”. The success of Rob Cesternino on that season is hard to justify if the game is truly about physical survival. So, even with this estimate, you’d expect, around this time, that the previews would switch to talking about the casts, twists, and possibly a hint of strategy for the new season. Yet, with only a couple of exceptions, this style of preview, focusing on the new location, continued up through the preview for “Survivor Nicaragua”, pretty much the halfway point of “Survivor” at the time of this writing.
Conversely, a peak at the cast, now very much the norm, did not happen in any form for quite some time. The first preview to even SHOW the cast was for “Survivor Fiji”, since the show highlighted the diversity in socioeconomic status in their casting. They noted that they had “A former homeless street performer” and a “Harvard educated lawyer” on the same season, and showed clips of Dreamz and Alex, respectively, when mentioning this. And it would take another year before we actually heard any of the cast SPEAK in the preview, with the first instance being in the “Survivor Micronesia” preview. Yeah, well after the viewing audience had abandoned the idea of physical survival being a major factor on the show, the show doggedly tried to act like this was the case in the preview. They paid lip service to it, more so as time went by. Mostly through the use of the phrase “How will they survive the elements, and more importantly, survive each other?”. But if you were someone new only seeing the preview for some reason, you’d be forgiven for thinking the show was about actual, physical survival.
For every rule, however, there is an exception, and this era of preview has a few exceptions to this rule. Most notably, in instances where the show had to reuse a location (such as with “Survivor Exile Island” or “Survivor Heroes vs. Villains”), they couldn’t exactly focus on the wonder, mystery, and danger of a location the viewers were already familiar with. Logically, they went to the next step, and focussed instead on the twist or gimmick of the season. The preview for “Survivor Exile Island” focussed on the titular “Exile Island” twist, while “Survivor Micronesia” and “Survivor Heroes vs Villains” focussed on their respective tribe divisions, and the 10th anniversary in the latter case. The show also began using the technique of reminding viewers of the previous exotic locations the show had been to to hype up the legacy of the show continuing, and oddly, not always when going to a reused location. “Survivor Palau”, which could easily have had a regular season preview in the “new location” style, was the first to utilize this technique.
Perhaps the most confusing outlier, however, is the preview for “Survivor All-Stars”. Or rather, I should say, the LACK of a preview for “Survivor All-Stars”. Yes, out of all of the seasons in this era, with the exception of “Survivor Borneo” (which obviously couldn’t have one due to coming first), this is the only season to not get a proper preview video at the end of the previous season. Probst just says a couple sentences about various old castaways coming back, and asks everyone to tune in next season. Underwhelming by any measure, but particularly baffling given that this is a season that should be EASY to hype up. After all, this is something fans had been speculating about for years at this point, and hyping themselves up online for such an event. Surely a preview extravaganza would be in order? Well, while I don’t have a definitive answer, I can offer a couple of hypotheses.
For the more cynical side of things, one might assume that production just had little faith in the season as a whole. Filming had wrapped only three days prior to the Pearl Islands finale, so they knew how the season would play out. It’s well known that pretty much all of production were not happy with the result, and Probst in particular was vocal that it was not fun to work on. With all that so fresh in production’s mind, perhaps they just didn’t feel the season merited the grand preview the season premise would indicate. If one is perhaps more optimistic, it might simply be that the show felt it did not have a good way to market itself. Really, the entire draw of a season like this IS the cast, but as mentioned, the show was quite reluctant to give any casting hints in their previews at this time. Perhaps they just wanted to avoid spoilers, and figured the hype of the premise itself would be enough, preview or no preview. How badly the cast was spoiled even prior to the end of Pearl Islands might also be a factor here, but as I wasn’t part of the online fandom at the time, I can’t say for certain. If someone is reading this who was, how soon was the cast of “Survivor All-Stars” known? It really would be interesting data to help with coming to a conclusion.
Moving along, naturally the era of hyping up the location itself came to an end. It was less due to public perception changing, however, and more due to logistical concerns. Once the seasons started shooting back to back in the same location, every other season, at a minimum, would be hard, if not impossible, to hype up as an exotic and dangerous location if it was one we’d already seen before. Thus, from “Survivor Redemption Island” on, pretty much up until the present day, the twist of the season became the defining feature of the preview. How would the tribes be divided? What new twist would our players have to face in the upcoming season? These were now the sort of questions the preview was posing to try and hype up the next season.
Interestingly, the format for hyping up the twist was more fluid in this era than the format for hyping up the location in previous seasons. Initially, it stayed focussed on the twist, with rarely any appearances by the cast, either in voice over or in on-camera shot. “Survivor Caramoan” saw the second return of contestants appearing, making it seem as though such an appearance was limited only to seasons subtitled “Fans vs. Favorites”.
Then came the brief stretch where “Survivor” tried to focus more on social media hype than on preview hype. “Survivor Blood vs Water”, “Survivor Cagayan”, and “Survivor San Juan del Sur” all have exceptionally short previews, only a few seconds long. Instead, the show let people speculate on these incredibly vague previews (Blood vs. Water was just a shot of a drop of “blood” falling into water, Cagayan showed the logo with “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast” changing to “Brains, Brawn, Beauty”, and San Juan del Sur had a lot of quotes about how great “Survivor Blood vs. Water” was), and showed these speculations via tweets at the end of the reunion to hype up the season. A decent enough idea, but really fell flat, particularly as most of the ideas they chose to highlight were ridiculous, rather than anything that could actually get people talking and debating. Most notably, they highlighted a tweet for the “Survivor Blood vs Water” preview which suggested that the location would have a lot of sharks. Give me a break.
No, it would not be until the preview for “Survivor Worlds Apart” where hearing from the contestants would become the norm (since technically “Survivor Cambodia” did not get a traditional “preview”, but instead a live vote reveal), and continue up through the present day. From that season on, the only season to get a preview and NOT feature any of the new cast talking was “Survivor Island of the Idols”, which features Rob and Sandra instead. True, it could be argued they count as “cast”, but I’d classify them more as “on-screen producers” myself. Helping this trend was the large number of “vs” seasons during this time period. Brains vs. Brawn vs. Beauty, Heroes vs. Healers, vs. Hustlers, David vs. Goliath. The show really had a thing for dividing tribes along semi-arbitrary lines during this era, and having the cast talk about what it meant to be a part of their particular group was a good marketing strategy. This is also where the average of hearing from six players per season became codified, since it fit neatly into this format. After all, if you want to talk about some divide, you want an equal number of representatives from each side, and 6 divides evenly into both a 2 tribe and 3 tribe “versus” format. Notably, seasons during this time that DIDN’T have such a divide were less likely to adhere to the 6 contestants rule, with “Survivor Game Changers” and “Survivor Ghost Island” only having two players make appearances, and “Survivor Winners at War” having 8 (though three of the latter were voice over, more easily identified due to the winners being more iconic than unknown players).
So, if being unable to emphasize the location was the impetus behind emphasizing the twist, you’d think that being unable to emphasize some game-defining twist would be the impetus to emphasizing the cast to the degree we saw in the last preview. Yet, while “Survivor 41” did not get a preview at all, “Survivor 42”, which purely reused twists, still emphasized that they were reusing said twists. It had a decent number of the cast shown (8 overall, though 4 of these were purely in voiceover, rather than a full confessional), but also talks about the twists that the contestants will have to endure, as well as the accursed “Monster” metaphor the show keeps emphasizing. So no, “Survivor 42” still fits right in with the preview family of this era.
Which brings us to “Survivor 43”, and the results of the date I gathered. First off if you, like me, thought we saw more of the cast in this preview than in previous ones, you’re not wrong. The preview for “Survivor 43” holds the record for the most individuals we see a confessional from in the preview at 9. Technically we heard from as many people in the preview for “Survivor Worlds Apart”, but that was purely in voice-over, and there might have been some doubling-up I missed. For now, I’m fine saying “Survivor 43” holds the record for most people shown in its preview.
Yet, even this explanation alone is not enough. Yes, we have more people in this preview than any other, and yes, we have no twists emphasized instead, but it’s still only slightly more than some other previews. Again, “Survivor Winners at War” had a respectable 8 identifiable players, barely less than “Survivor 43”, yet felt like we saw much less of them. For that, I have a simple hypothesis as to why this is: It’s not what’s present in the preview, but what’s absent that makes the difference. That something is Probst Narration.
Yes, with the exception of those three exceptionally short previews at the end of the 20’s I mentioned, every season preview save for “Survivor 43” has had Probst narrating the action, giving us a hint of what’s to come. Here, however, Probst is completely absent, just letting the cast speak for themselves. The hype doesn’t come from Probst, but from the player, and THAT, dear reader, is the big departure. With nothing else to distract from them, you’re focussed on the cast for 100% of the preview run time, something no other preview (that’s full-length) can boast. That, I believe, is the major factor as to why it feels like we saw more of the cast than we did on previous season previews.
Why would CBS make this switch? Again, I can offer a couple of hypotheses, mostly based on trends of how the show has developed. Over the course of its history, the show has tried, in each preview, to hype up everything BUT the cast. They started with the location. When the locations got reused, they emphasized the twists. It was only when the twists began being about tribe divisions on the regular that they started putting in new cast members on the regular. This may seem like it’s been going on for a while, but really, this has only been a thing for the past 6 years or so, at least regularly. But this trend got us used to the idea, and with “vs” twists seeming to be a thing of the past, as well as back-to-back seasons being carbon-copies twist-wise, really the only thing LEFT is to emphasize the cast. More cynically, one could argue that the show has stopped caring about spoilers. After all, logic would dictate that the main reason not to show any of the new cast is to avoid the public getting spoilers about your new cast. By showing half the cast in this preview, it could been seen as the show saying “Yeah, we know you’ll know the cast by now. Go ahead and look, we don’t care anymore.” Still, that’s perhaps a bit cynical, even for me. More likely there’s a marriage of the two. With the greater prevalence of internet culture than when the show started, coupled with the realities of staying in one location for filming permanently and needing to reveal the winner on the island due to COVID, hiding spoilers is that much harder. CBS could fight, but if the public’s going to find out anyway, why not just get a great preview out of it? Take the lemons of a spoiled cast, and make lemonade out of an engaging preview.
And that is why, whatever you think about the new style of preview, I suggest you get used to it, as it is likely here to stay. Again, with no location or twist to newly emphasize, all the show has left is the cast. They may tweak the style a little bit, but without the need to hide the cast for spoilers, expect this sort of preview to become the norm moving forward.
And there you have it: A brief history of the “Survivor” season preview. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little romp through history as much as I have! As a bonus, here’s a couple of fun facts I noted during my research, but didn’t have a good place to include in the body of the work:
-While Probst narration is a mainstay of most previews, Probst himself very rarely appears on-camera in them. I only remembered him being in the preview for “Survivor The Australian Outback”, and was prepared to write this off as an example of “Early Installment Weirdness”, and was thus surprised when he put in a brief appearance at the beginning of the preview for “Survivor The Amazon”. The reasons why remain a mystery to me.
-Much was made of the preview for “Survivor 42” intentionally deceiving us, putting the voiceover of Maryanne finding the idol over footage of Tori looking at a paper. Yet, this is not the first time a preview has been misleading. It’s happened a number of times over the course of the previews, but the first outright error I could find was in the preview for “Survivor Vanuatu”. Probst specifically says there will be “16 castaways”, when there ended up being 18. This could just be them changing the number of contestants after the preview was made, admittedly, but an error nonetheless.
-While most season previews that feature the contestants try and show an equal number from both tribes, the major exception is “Survivor Micronesia” the first time the players are heard to talk in the preview. They show an above-average number of players at a respectable 7, but all of those seven are from the “Fans” side. None of the favorites are shown, a trend that continues through most All-Star type seasons. Even “Survivor Heroes vs. Villains” did not name the players, instead showing highlights from fan-favorite past seasons, which did show some players on the season (such as Coach), but also some who did not appear (such as Jonny Fairplay).
-When you watch these preview back-to-back, you come to realize that producers have some shots/moments they love to favor as their B-roll for the previews. Some are mundane shots that would be hard to pick out unless you’re looking for them. For instance, they LOVE showing shots of people jumping off the ship during the Pearl Islands Marooning. Others, however, are more notable and predictable. I never thought I’d say this, but I tire of hearing Erik say “I want to give individual immunity to Natalie”. When you see it used multiple times in subsequent previews, it loses its luster.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this off-season content! Keep an eye out for the next one!
-Matt
Title Credit and Idea to Jean Storrs.
idolspeculation 