The phrase “Jeff Probst would like to speak to you” can’t not sound like you’re being summoned to the principal’s office.

Several weeks ago, after Survivor aired a fairly straightforward episode where a player, Stephanie Johnson, was voted out after being outnumbered on her tribe. There were no immunity idols to save her, nor were there any last-minute alliance-shifting bombshells at tribal council. After the episode, fan reaction was muted at best, with a lot of the reviews calling the show “boring.” I ended up writing an article about how Survivor may have written itself into a corner after several season of increasingly high-stakes fireworks at tribal council, that even an incredibly well-produced hour of television (as that Stephanie elimination was) is unsatisfying if it’s predictable. It was an article that voiced something that had been nagging at me about Survivor (a show I deeply love) for a while, and I thought I handled it okay. And then I got an email from someone at CBS saying that Jeff Probst wanted to get on the phone and discuss the article with me.

As a general rule of thumb, you don’t want to hear from the people you’re writing about, especially if you’ve just written critically. Buzzfeed film critic Alison Willmore had a great anecdote recently about Harvey Weinstein calling her on the phone to upbraid her about tweets she’d made about Tulip Fever. Nobody likes to have their creative output criticized, so I figured I was being taken to the woodshed for a talking-to. Fair enough. Maybe I’d get a good story out of it. But much to my surprise, the twice-delayed interview (turns out filming the next season of Survivor in Fiji means dealing with quite a bit of weather, including a cyclone) was nothing at all like I’d feared. I’ll spare you the pleasantries, but the Jeff Probst I talked to on the phone was bright, complimentary (!), and generally enthusiastic to talk to a journalist who was as into the show as I clearly am. As the host and executive producer of Survivor — he graduated to EP some time around season 21 (we’re on season 36 now) — Probst is the show’s biggest cheerleader, but he also operates as something approaching a mad scientist, always tinkering with the beast to see what could be changed, improved, or made more interesting.

These changes, Probst told me, are not simply for the sake of creating fireworks or to achieve some kind of “wow” factor. Most changes are made to stay ahead of a game where the players are constantly thinking of ways to perfect it. When I mentioned a handful of ways the game of Survivor had evolved over the years — tribe swaps, advantages, merging at larger numbers — Probst said, “As you said each one of them, I knew exactly why it was in the show right now. There was a reason for it.”

“Larger juries were a specific change from me to keep stars on the show longer,” he explained. “Meaning, if you start with twenty people and you have a jury of eight and have a final two, that means half of your cast is going to be out of the show by the time you get to the finale. If you go with the jury of ten, and three [finalists], now you’ve got thirteen. You’ve just upped your percentages of having likable people still on the show.” He said similar considerations went into starting the game with 20 players rather than 16. “If you start with sixteen, like we used to, you can have a lot more time for individual stories. But if one person quits or gets evacuated, you’re in trouble structurally because you don’t have any extra people. So we started going with eighteen. Eighteen requires three tribes if you want even men and women, otherwise you’re at uneven men and uneven women (which is also okay; we’ll do that again). But then we found twenty is a pretty good number.”

He reminds me that these changes have been happening since the earliest seasons, since the prototypical Survivor villain Richard Hatch introduced something called an alliance into game parlance in season 1. “I remember we were doing a challenge,” Probst reminisced. “Richard and Sue [Hawk] were either out of the challenge or weren’t participating, I can’t remember, but they were standing next to me. And Richard said something to Sue about voting together. First of all, I couldn’t believe they were talking next to me because we didn’t really know what the show was going to be. It was their show, it was their rules. And then I couldn’t believe they were actually going to conspire against somebody together. It didn’t occur to us, which seems absurd right now that we wouldn’t notice that.”

So much like the first man emerging from the cave, picking up a bone, and using it as a tool to better bludgeon his enemies, Hatch found a way to use the people around him to his advantage. This led to one of Survivor‘s first orthodoxies; namely, you get the numbers advantage and then you sit on it until you’ve whittled the tribe down to your end game. That predictability doesn’t always make for super great TV, of course, so the producers began introducing twists into the game, starting in season 3. And as Probst tells it, the fans bitched about them from the beginning.

“In terms of how fast [did] we start adding twists,” Probst said, “I think Africa [season 3] was the first time we even switched tribes. I remember the outrage of people, ‘I can’t believe! That’s so unfair!’ I think of that all the time and remind our guys that. Remember: people hated when we switched tribes. They’re going to hate the idol, they’re going to hate an extra vote.”

In terms of adding twists to the game, it’s not so much a matter of saying yes or no, but when? “There are ideas that come up that we have yet to figure out how to implement or how to execute in a way that is fair,” Probst said. “It changes with the time. There were years where we would not put an extra vote into the game. It was an easy thing to do. Great idea, simple, it could change tribal council. And there were seven or eight, maybe ten years where we kept saying ‘It’s just too much power.’ One extra vote? Just too much power. Now, yeah, there’s probably going to be an extra vote or a steal-a-vote or a block-vote — something involving a vote in most seasons. So it’s not so much where it’s too far, it’s a question of, is it too far right now?”

He understands there’s likely going to be pushback from some segment of the fans, but he tends to chalk that up to a people-fear-change attitude. Or else a more partisan attitude. “Anything that messes with somebody they like in the game, people hate,” he said. “Anything that helps somebody they like in the game, they will love.”

One such example occurred a couple seasons ago, during the “Game Changers” season, an all-star affair starring some of the most beloved returning players in series history (and also Brad Culpepper and Troyzan). During a final-6 tribal council that saw five of the players produce some kind of idol or advantage that kept them safe from the vote, only one player was left vulnerable: Cirie Fields, the 40something mother of three whose Survivor journey from the couch to the jungles of Fiji included four seasons on the show, three top-6 finishes, and the designation as perhaps the most beloved Survivor contestant of all time.

To see Cirie go down in such gaudy fashion, without a single vote cast against her, done in by all these newfangled trinkets … how were we meant to receive that? Was it a tragedy of an over-stuffed game? Or was it the kind of spectacle that is only befitting a player of Cirie’s stature?

“Definitely the latter,” Probst said. “No question at all. […] Any season that has a theme like that has a poster. In my head, I see a poster. And the poster in ‘Game Changers’ was the end of Reservoir Dogs. There needs to be, at some point in this season, a bloodbath. If we’re lucky, we’ll get it. We could never have set it up to have it happen like it did. But from the beginning of Game Changers, the idea was let’s put enough toys in the toy box so that [the players] can have fun and change the game whenever they want. We never dreamed it would culminate like it did, where they would all hold on to all of their toys and their advantages and wait until the same moment and play all of them. But, as it happened and after it was over, I saw the poster. And I felt like the season had just fulfilled on its promise. ‘You will see something extraordinary.’ And the icing on top is that is it happened to one of the most beloved, one of my favorite people I have met in life and one of Survivor’s most cherished characters, Cirie. And on top of it, it then gives you a story and a question to ask yourself: is Cirie ever meant to win? Is she the woman who got up off the couch and that’s your adventure? You got up off the couch. You’re not going to win, not in this time period. You already had your big adventure. All of that to me is just endlessly underlined, fascinating. I can’t get enough of it.”

You really get the sense that Jeff Probst is telling a narrative in his head even as he’s watching the game play out. It’s a quality I’ve often dinged him for: the way he’ll aggressively narrate an immunity challenge in order to make sure the home audience knows there’s a hero and a goat and a comeback story. Or the way he’ll shape the conversation at Tribal in order to create story out of what can seem like chaos. It can feel heavy-handed or agenda-laden in the moment, but after speaking with Probst, it’s tough to blame him too harshly for it. It’s how he experiences the show, and he does it with the same enthusiasm we do at home.

Revisiting that Stephanie Johnson elimination that got called boring, Probst described it like the ascent of a rollercoaster. Not the fun part, but the part that’s necessary to get to the fun part. “You have an episode like Stephanie’s out. That was just a fun, different episode. We could spend time with her in the sand. She can talk about her family. But if you do three of those in a row, it’s predictable. So it’s this tapestry of ideas and this roller coaster that you don’t want to be too extreme, but you want to always have a turn, and here’s the upside down part, and every so often, hang on, because it’s really going to spin out of control. And it’ll get back on track. That’s how I kind of look at the show.”

To hear Probst tell it, the twists and turns that have been added over the years come from a creative environment on a producer level that he’s very proud of. Not every idea works — or at least, not every idea works now; he made a point of noting that certain ideas might get kicked a few seasons down the road — but they’re all welcome.

“When we decided we were going to do [current season] Ghost Island,” he said, “we all got together, I said let’s just write down on the board every single thing that has to do with haunted houses, ghosts, spirits, everything. And one of our guys said, ‘Okay, this is crazy, but we could have speakers on Ghost Island and they could play scary noises.’ And everybody instantly knew we weren’t going to do that. But what it led to was I think I said, ‘Speakers are too far, probably. But it would be nice to have some smoke.’ The same person said ‘Yeah, like a fog machine.’ And we went ‘Yeah, but not a fog machine.’ And then one of our production designers in the art department said, ‘No, but I can burn coconut husk and it would just be a low simmering fog, and it would work.’ There you go. That idea, that’s on Ghost Island.”

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