Well, I did promise y’all some off-season content despite this being the shorter off-season, which is usually a break for me. Think it’s about high time I delivered.
Specifically, I want to put my oar in the water regarding the “New Era” of “Survivor”, specifically seasons 41-43, in case someone is reading this way in the future and doesn’t recall what the definition of that was in this particular moment in time. While everyone’s opinion is going to vary, of course, I think it’s fair to describe the reaction to these seasons as mixed. All have their good moments, but very rarely do they rise to the level of “great”. Ultimately, the reaction averages out to “Ok, but not the best.” Yes, I know there’s outrage at the under-editing of any winner not named Maryanne, but even that eventually dies down. I think once the complaining about Gabler’s edit subsides, 43 will settle into that average as well.
So, this got me thinking as to why. Outside of the first episode or two of 41 (the hype for which can be chalked up to us being starved for “Survivor” after a year hiatus due to COVID), why is it that the seasons don’t seem to stand out. Not the worst of the worst, but just kind of there. Obviously there’s probably not one single factor which leads to this, but a confluence of several factors. Still, even if there are multiple factors, I think they boil down to a certain principle, one which helps explain why “Survivor” is in the state that it is currently in:
There is no room to innovate anymore.
Here’s what I mean by that: When you look at older seasons of “Survivor”, the premise itself is pretty simple: Strand 16-20 people in a deserted part of the world. They compete in challenges every three days or so that grants a tribe (or sometimes multiple tribes) immunity, losers having to kick someone off. Eventually, everyone joins one big team, and challenges become individual. The whole group kicks one person off every three days, until the last three where it becomes daily. At the end, the most recent set of people you voted off serve as a jury deciding between those remaining who deserves to win.
And that’s it! Yeah, some stuff would get added. Hidden Immunity Idols, Tribe Swaps, even things like Exile Island lasted long enough that, at least for a time, they could be considered “added to the formula”. But beyond that, what exactly happened, how the game played out, was left to the players and producers. Players could value any sort of traits they wanted. Ally with and flip on people at their leisure. The exact nature of the “society” would change with the seasons. And production had room to innovate as well. Maybe there’s a tribe swap this season. Maybe two. Certain advantages might be there, or they might not be. You could mix and match, to the point where no season is like any other.
Then you come to the “modern” seasons of “Survivor”, and suddenly that formula has a lot less that can be shaken up. Three tribes with no swap is always how it’s going to be. Merge after 5 episodes. One person voted out by a large group before the merge officially happens. You get the idea. With the formula so strict, so well-known, it makes the seasons feel, well, same-y.
Now it’s true, the PLAYERS didn’t know how strictly formula the game was going to be, but after 41, they at least had SOME precedent for things like Shipwheel Island. And regardless of how the players feel, the AUDIENCE knows what’s coming, and has seen it before, again, giving a sense of repetition that, for all that the premise remained unchanged, was not an issue with the older seasons.
But it’s not just the format that makes everything feel the same. No, having such a predictable formula also leads to the GAMEPLAY being similar across seasons as well. Take Shipwheel Island as an example. With the exception of JD on “Survivor 41”, pretty much everyone has come clean about what happened on their “journeys”. We, the audience, may deride them for instance, but for my part, it’s the only move a person returning from one such event can do. After 41, EVERYONE knows you go to Shipwheel Island or one of its cousins, you get the chance to earn something. Thus, you can’t say you just didn’t get anything; no one’s going to believe you. Now, you could lie, and say you didn’t take a risk when you did, but it’s SUCH an easy lie to get called out on. If you slip up at all in your delivery of the lie, you’re caught, and now a threat. People don’t trust you, and want you voted out. Even if your delivery is flawless, you have to keep that up until the point where you use said advantage. And if someone finds your little bauble before you’re honest about it, same deal. Much better to just tell the easier lie (or possible truth) of “I want to use this for the group” than to try and hide it. Hiding such an advantage, when everyone will be suspicious you got one regardless, is a high-risk, low reward move, and thus, it is logical that a lot of players don’t take it.
The point that I’m getting at here is that the similarities in gameplay is by DESIGN, not by choice. With the show’s move towards effectively playing the same game with the same twists over and over, they ensure that we get basically the same show season after season. Given that it was the ever-changing casts and strategy that kept “Survivor” alive up to this point, this may not seem like a good thing.
Why, then, would production do this? Why get rid of innovation if it one of your show’s greatest strengths? Well, there’s a variety of factors. Money is certainly one. Running basically the same game reduces logistical issues, and the shorter game and same filming locations make it easier to reuse assets, thus saving money, which no one in their right mind is going to object to in business. Easier logistics also means your show runs more smoothly behind the scenes, which again, I can see being a major incentive for production. Then there’s the possibility that they feel they’ve struck the best balance in terms of the game, and don’t want to mess much with what they consider “perfection”.
But for me, there’s two major factors that lead us to this point, and that need to be addressed. The first is fairness. The show may not always listen to fan feedback, but I think one charge that got to them from some of the more recent seasons was that the influx of advantages was too much, and by extension, “unfair”. For example, the case of Jamal Shipman on “Survivor Island of the Idols”. In the event that you’ve erased that season from your mind, for which I would not blame you, Jamal found a hanging note at camp that basically said “If you claim me, I’m yours”. This sent him to the titular Island of the Idols, where literally everyone else got to play some game or compete in some challenge to win an advantage. Jamal… Did not. He was basically told “Ha Ha, Screw you! Nothing on this show is free!”. This despite the fact that given some of the challenges that had come previously, some of the things people had earned were effectively “free”. Put more diplomatically, Jamal was “punished” in game by losing his vote despite exhibiting the behaviors that other players had been rewarded for.
This, combined with the accusation that the show was throwing out too many advantages in general, I feel led to some of the changes we see in the modern seasons. To help keep people from picking up too many advantages at once (because, you know, having fewer advantages is not an option), advantages all come with some kind of risk to them. This principle is good, and one of the better additions to more modern seasons. But the show has, in my view, now swung too far in the other direction from the randomness of something like “Island of the Idols”. Now, even the MECHANISM for delivering these advantages must be identical. Someone goes to Shipwheel Island and gets a chance at an advantage? Well, now EVERYONE does it! Someone has to get beads to make an idol? Now EVERYONE has to do that to make an idol!
Thus, there is no real room to maneuver for anyone here. If everyone knows what you’ve been to do, you room to innovate, to say something different happened, is all but gone. Logically, then, the thing to do is the thing that worked in the past, and thus, we seasons play out the same way over and over and over again.
Now, I’m not saying the show needs to be unfair to be fun. I certainly think Jamal got done dirty in the event described previously, and I don’t think anyone should LOSE anything in the game to no benefit. But there needs to be some VARIETY in how things go down. What if the “journey” is SOMETIMES for an advantage, but is sometimes just that, a journey? Your reward is any information you can get out of the people you happened to take the journey with from the other teams. Yeah, people might not believe it the first time it happens, and I would feel sorry for the saps who get it first, but in the long run, it would be to the show’s benefit. Now, you NEVER know what a journey might entail. It might be a powerful something, an average something, or nothing at all. This gives the players more latitude to make stuff up, and try out new ideas and strategies we haven’t seen before. The seasons would become vibrant again! Or hey, what about there’s still a task involved in activating a hidden immunity idol, and until you do so you lose your vote, but each tribe’s idol has a different task? Maybe one tribe has to gather beads like we saw on 43, while another has to get some seal off of each person’s canteen, and the third maybe has to take a specific role in a challenge to activate said idol. Not the same task for each team, but an equivalent one in terms of difficulty that keeps the principle of “No reward without risk”, while still giving the players room to play without everything being the same for everyone.
It should be said that this strategy is not without issues of its own. Finding tasks equivalent in difficulty is not the easiest thing to do, and it’s definitely easier to just have everyone do the same thing, no matter what tribe they’re on. However, it also makes the show more repetitive, and makes each season start to blend together. And even if they’re not EXACTLY fair, I say, since when has “Survivor” been about fairness? True, it should strive to be fair in this area if they can, but not at the cost of losing out on innovation. A good game strikes a balance between luck and skill. At the far end of the “luck” spectrum would be something like “Chutes and Ladders”, where you have literally no control, and it’s all down to the dice. At the other end would be “Chess”, where you have perfect information about what moves can be made, and can react accordingly. “Survivor”, as it should, has always rested somewhere in the middle. It leans more skill than luck, but if it were pure skill, we wouldn’t talk about being getting “swap-screwed”, now would we? But now we’re leaning a little too hard into the “skill” side, perhaps. People have too much information, and it makes them play a similar way. Move and counter-move, all prescribed by years of practice and watching the show. By adding in just a BIT of variance, you allow the players the room to make riskier plays, and keep the show going towards greatness. After all, how many of us tune in on a regular basis to watch a chess match? I thought so.
But this, then, brings us to the other big reason why I feel “Survivor” has made these changes. They are, to reverse Shakespeare, afraid of greatness. Or more accurately, they’re afraid of “High Risk, High Reward” type seasons.
You’ll notice that, for all my complaining about facets of the “modern” seasons, I haven’t called any of them “bad”. I’ve said they’re kind of repetitive, not the most engaging or innovative, but neither are they without merit. They’re just kind of ok. You watch, you get some measure of enjoyment, you move on.
From a production standpoint, this looks like the ideal. Creating a product like a television show is always a risk. After all, what if something doesn’t work? What if people hate what you put out? Having something without that risk, a proven formula you know can work, suddenly starts to seem attractive. Innovation, then, starts to seem like the enemy. An unnecessary risk you can put away simply by sticking to what you know is at least somewhat acceptable to your audience.
Limited risk, however, leads to limited reward. As I hope I’ve by now demonstrated, this lack of risk prevents a season from being truly great. Yes, by keeping the game largely the same, you avoid having a disaster of a season, but you also aren’t going to get anything we the audience haven’t seen before. You won’t go out in a blaze of glory, but instead all but guarantee a slow, inglorious fading into obscurity. Still, from a production standpoint, I can see why that seems a fair trade for never having a disaster season again. Coming fairly fresh off the heels of more innovative, but less poorly received, seasons like “Edge of Extinction” and particularly “Island of the Idols”, it might seem like a godsend. But keeping it up for too long just leads to the gentle winnowing of your fanbase, to the point that eventually, you’ll have no fanbase at all.
Is this to be the doom of the show? I hope not. There’s certainly ways they can innovate while still keeping the good things to come out of this era. Again, the risk vs. reward dilemmas are not bad in and of themselves, but should not be present at every single opportunity, for instance. And a stellar cast CAN elevate a season close to greatness. I stand by “Survivor 42” being on of the all-time great seasons, largely due to a stellar cast. But the seasons cast succeeds IN SPITE of the formulaic nature of the show, not because of it. Good as the casting department is, you can’t rely on them getting grand-slam casting every single time. There are some things that annoy me about “modern” seasons, but are here to stay, and we need to just accept that. Some examples include:
26 Day Season: This one annoys me about as much as the rest of the fanbase, and I do think 39 days works better for the show. The long game gives more time for plotting and scheming, and is harder on the body in general (not to mention allowing for more impressive rewards). But try telling that to an accounting department. I don’t like this one, but I think we have to acknowledge that from a cost standpoint, this is better, and the show will not go back to the old ways, barring a mass boycott of the fans.
Immediate Reunion Shows: Again, see above. I like hearing from the people voted out early, seeing people cleaned up, and people having more of a chance to reflect on their game. But given how much money it saves, coupled with less risk of another pandemic cancelling the reunion, we’re not getting this one back.
Real-Life Flashbacks: I personally kind of like these, but do see them becoming a crutch for character development, and the show is overusing them. Bring them up when relevant is fine, and everyone deserves at least one, but try and have it flow a BIT with what’s happening on the show at that time, please.
No True Villains: I get where people are coming from in saying they want truly despicable, out-and-out villains on the show again, but in this time period, doing so would just be irresponsible on the show’s part. People have always had difficulty separating “person on the show” from “person in real life” even with actors playing fictional characters. With reality tv, this is even worse. Let’s be honest, this fanbase has no chill at times, and cannot be trusted to interact responsibly with a villain online. If you don’t believe me, look at the treatment of Jerri Manthey post “Survivor The Australian Outback”. You saw at the All-Stars reunion how that had affected her, and she didn’t even do much of anything THAT BAD by modern standards. Think how much worse that would have been had social media been a common thing at that time. Jerri may have been treated like shit, but at least (to my knowledge) she wasn’t DOXXED. You may want villains, but socially, you can’t have them.
Those quick points out of the way, we return to my thesis. Modern “Survivor” may not be bad, but is largely doomed to mediocrity by sticking too closely to a new formula. Still, I’m just one jerk with a blog. Feel free to let me know what you all think, and in the meantime, we can try and enjoy our ok seasons.
-Matt
idolspeculation 
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