GI went on a pretty sharp nosedive in the post-merge.

I don’t think this is controversial to say; at least, it shouldn’t be. Nothing offensive or particularly abhorrent happened, and none of the gameplay elements really offended me, even the unmerge as problematic as it was. However, it suffers from many problems that I feel can be summarized in one big overarching problem: a lot of negative trends of modern Survivor take up a lot of space when the rest is filled with dead air.

There’s nothing, abhorrent or interesting, that can really distract from the uglier elements of the show that should be fixed. They do not feel like they’re going away, as even on a season this boring they persist and become the main showcase. They’re problems a lot of people point out, and even more passionately defend as something never to be addressed (or else).

Look at me, addressing them.

I’ve written a lot about the state of Survivor, mainly its flaws. In part, that’s because there’s not much to address this season, but also because the most fascinating part of Survivor is the construction and deconstruction of it. What makes people tick? What makes the show tick? What are the consequences of what it’s doing?

Then I realized they weren’t clear, because the show is getting stagnant now.

That’s what I really object to- the fact that we are on a plateau and it’s at a low level. The things I have talked about before do not seem set to change, and the complex things I talk about seem like blips on the radar. The formula is set- and while sometimes it’s sweet, and other times it’s nasty, mostly it’s tasteless. Survivor is fast becoming the unleavened bread of television.

While it’s easy to say “go to new locations!” and things like that, they’re only temporary solutions. Other people are content to let the emperor run around naked and compliment him on his clothes, almost petrified to allow any discussion of Survivor’s flaws take place. Fun fact for me, though, I started becoming a dedicated fan after Caramoan. Not because Caramoan was so good (puh-fucking-leeze) but because Survivor was such a fascinating concept, and nothing was being done with it. I knew in the past there had to be interesting things done with it.

That’s why I’m talking about what’s wrong with modern day Survivor- because these things do not seem close to changing and if they don’t, Survivor in my eyes won’t be whole again- just a coasting celebration of mediocrity, which is what the fans seem to be doing with Michael Yerger.

Idols and Advantages

Idols have been seen as a common element to gameplay for more than a decade now. They aren’t going away. Even basic seasons are letting at least one or two through, which is a relatively respectable amount for my lowered standards. However, the number of idols has been ramping up ever since Cagayan, where there were, for the first time I can recall, enough idols in play at once to cause an Advantagegeddon at earlier than the last time idols could be played- the three original tribe idols and the God idol could have been hypothetically held onto until Final Six, all played at once, and then someone would be forced out of the game.

However, they weren’t, because every idol in that season deflected exactly zero votes. Even the God idol only worked in hypothetical as Tony tried using it to survive the F4 vote past where the idol cutoff is. That’s been how idols generally work- and now it’s more noticeable as after a few seasons where we got four at most, we started getting upwards of six to nine every season. Yes, Heroes vs Healers vs Hustlers had the day one super idol, Joe’s idol, Mike’s idol, Joe’s idol, Ryan’s idol, Lauren’s idol, Ben’s idol, Ben’s idol, and Ben’s idol.

The funny thing is, we didn’t notice it, or the volley of advantages that were tossed around like candy. That’s because for the most part they didn’t affect the season until way far along, when Ben started churning out idols that were suspiciously hidden where he gave confessionals.

Ghost Island takes this to eleven. Successful advantage plays have been nearly scarce this season, and while every now and again they’re bad enough to warrant some reaction (I will never understand why Chris didn’t play his idol good for only two rounds in the one round people were shouting their votes for him just in case) most just fizzle out. Did you remember that there was a Legacy Advantage this season? If you said yes, congrats, because even I had to think for that one.

There have been seven idols so far (including the legacy advantage), and while two have not been played, four have only negated one vote combined. Not only that, but none of the advantages or lost votes have really panned out to anything.

It’s a shame, because if we have to have advantages the ones we have bring unique twists to them- and I hope we get some out of Wendell having the Micronesia necklace turned idol. Still, with all the spins and twists on the twists, it has a very, very low success rate, except the times where it fucks with the structure of the season. And it’s really bad when you either take up five minutes of airtime for nothing or ruin a season.

Solution: If you go for advantages, go light on them. People will guard them better and not throw them out every five seconds. Less airtime would be owed to people just for finding trinkets that take up too much story for little payoff. More importantly, we will not have enough of them to be useful only to tank a season.

Edit

I can hear people now. “If x didn’t find an advantage they didn’t EARN airtime!” “If x isn’t playing the game how I want they don’t DESERVE airtime!” “X may hypothetically do something that justifies why they don’t deserve airtime!” My answer is… do they deserve so little airtime that one person has 1/14th the confessionals someone else does?

The answer to that is “yes” far more than I think is healthy.

Here’s a stat for you- the top five people in the Final Ten have 151 confessionals between them. The bottom five have 49. Domenick has 43- take out Sea Bass and that’s as much as four people combined. The only season higher than the Final Ten Average is the season where a lot of fans’ minds changed from the days of RI where that was a bad thing- in Cagayan they thought that was a good thing.

Cagayan’s post-merge is notable for being a ping-pong match between overdog Tony and underdog Spencer. Tony is a magnetic character. Spencer was… there. In the notorious Episodes eight through eleven, those two had 64 confessionals of the 118 in those three episodes- 54.23% between those two when the episodes had on average of eight and a half people. The average is 23.5%, and while some are more magnetic camera presences than others (though is Spencer really more magnetic than Trish?) more than twice that amount?

This is essentially what a lot of viewers cape for. Because they believe every Domenick and Michael are somehow a new Tony and Spencer, they think it would be entirely fine to give them a disproportionate amount of airtime, when Domenick is not the only one running the game and Michael’s story really goes nowhere after it’s all said and done.

Moreover, what do they say that cannot be boiled down into far less confessionals and airtime? A lot of it is spent repeating things we already know- who has an idol, who’s on the bottom, what the plan is. A lot of airtime should be better spent. Hell, we even had Domenick narrate what was happening to Chelsea’s side of the unmerge. That’s a little cartoonish. All it tells us is “Domenick is important, and the second that Chelsea gets airtime she’s donezo.”

Even then, people will say that because there’s Ghost Island and other retro advantages as a roadblock, the divide of airtime is justified. Honestly, that just makes it worse. Take Cagayan. It was imbalanced in airtime, but there wasn’t really anything to show aside from the occasional idol. If you had like 30 confessionals amongst 8.5 people, it’s somewhat forgivable, if not good, if you get overeager and give Tony like 10 and Spencer like 5. You think you have more than you have. But if after Ghost Island and mandatory advantages, you have 15 to 20 confessionals, and you give Domenick and Michael half of them, then it’s far more intentional. You know how little you have, and you still divide the portions far from equally.

The edit has a lot of flaws that boil down to very few overarching storylines between a select few in a widely imbalanced edit. A select few get a lionhearted share that affects little, says the same thing, while a lot of storylines from big dogs and small fish drop altogether so they can focus on drilling the basics we already knew into our head.

Solution: Divide the confessionals with a little more fairness. The ones that are repetitive or reveal little to nothing, chop. The ones that are skeletal explanations, spread out. Replace that with new content and new people to give us a sense of what everyone is doing, and why, rather than us making assumptions.

Storylines

What do we know about the ten who made the last episode?

I mean, it’s easy to ask that for the underedited. Jenna has RBF. Sebastian talks about candy more than Gaius and also weed. Chelsea, literally nothing more than she sits and likes coffee. I could write more about some stranger at a job party than I could about her.

But how about the main characters? Dom, Wendell, Kellyn. Domenick has a disproportionate amount of airtime, but we just know he has idols, is sneaky, has a family, hates Chris, and is seen as a threat. Wendell has a girlfriend, is liked, Laurel thinks he’s sneaky, makes furniture. Kellyn had a divorce, is Naviti strong, and… help me out here. Not only is the edit imbalanced, it’s repetitive, and it goes nowhere or exactly where twenty of them indicated.

Take Twila. In her season, she started out as the tomboy on a tribe of women. We got to see what trouble her work ethic and prickliness got her and how others tried to guide her. We got to see her swap with the men and feel really comfortable around them, but get tricked to staying with the women and losing the trust of the men. We got to see that resentment lead to her turning on the women after it was made clear she and Scout were on the bottom. They got mad at her too, and at Final Tribal Council she was faced with the fact that she burnt down the homes she tried to build on both tribes.

See, that’s a storyline, and that’s just the barebones of it. We don’t have a real storyline here. No one ends at a different place than they start aside from game moves. What you see is what you get.

On Ghost Island, there were a lot of meaningful backstories, ones I found pretty interesting. Kellyn’s divorce, Chris and Donathan’s mothers, Domenick talking about family. They’re nice, but never really amount to anything. The only one I can think of that amounted to anything in the story was Angela talking about her military experience and her divorce causing her loneliness, justifying why she voted out James instead of the Naviti family that held backstabbers in it.

That leads to one of my problems with the season that I mentioned before- they set up interesting storylines that set the stage for the game, and then they go nowhere important. Donathan was never with Chris. Kellyn’s backstory was never consequential again. Even Angela’s aversion to loneliness was dropped off after James went, when it could have been very interesting. Just a little more airtime and Angela wouldn’t be purely circumstantial. The only storyline that went through was Domenick vs Chris, which played out as soon as they voted together. While that one for people is enough, people should want more than one of eight in a season.

Because we don’t let those develop, we don’t see them as people. And since we don’t see them as people, fans do not care about them. Who cares how nice Kellyn is in real life? She wants Naviti to survive and I was told that was not good! To the stake with the witch! It is encouraging people to hate human beings for the crime of not giving them their way- and maybe that’s exactly what CBS wants. Hate is a base emotion, so why not give them a base product?

Solution: Develop people as contestants and bring stories all the way through- give a little attention to them as the season goes. Keep people consistent, not repetitive, give us a track they follow and we can understand them following.

Structure

All four of these feed into each other in a circle. We see that having a bunch of advantages chips into the edit, but the problems are also in the way the edit tells the story, and now we get to this part- where I think the story is so weak because there’s too much to focus on.

A lot of people say “of course the story is barebones, there’s twenty people and forty minutes”. To that I say, indeed. There are twenty people and forty minutes. By eleven episodes there will be ten people and forty minutes. Why the hell is that the case? Why the hell are we almost done with the season but have half the cast left? That’s not a good idea, and when we defend and cape for the structure we can’t forget

That it’s because the cast is so bloated and stays bloated It’s a bad idea. They’ve done twenty person seasons without ten people in episode 11

I mean, let’s think of all twenty person seasons before Cambodia pioneered the six person finale. They generally had eight people in them, sometimes seven, sometimes nine. Even the ones with nine had less advantages stealing the episode’s airtime, and a set storyline to anchor it. However, modern Survivor seasons have a fixation on keeping as many castaways in as possible, but with their inability to equitably edit them, we don’t have ten contestants, we have six, maybe, and four extras.

Not only that, but the format changes aren’t making a shaken up game- just the opposite really. I admit it, I initially thought that if you swapped on day seven, you would have no real reason to rely on your older tribesmates. Boy was I wrong; days seven is the honeymoon period.

You are really happy to be on your tribe with not enough time for people to annoy you. If there’s a day seven swap and someone loses both challenges… odds are, you will have no reason to not go by tribal lines. It’s easy, it’s guaranteed safety, and you like them. Only in rare instances like Dom and Chris’ rivalry will they stop it. On day seven swaps with thirteen person merges, the tribe that loses both immunity challenges before have at best five of the thirteen at merge. Then at merge, why not make a bunch of easy votes before you get to the knitty gritty with like two or three spare Ulongs left?

If you ever wondered where Naviti Strong came from, that is if you stopped yelling at its existence, it came from a structure like this.

If they introduce early swaps to stop Pagongings it doesn’t happen. If they introduce multiple swaps to shake it up it absolutely doesn’t. If they introduced large merges to give more people more breathing room you are just begging them for easy votes- an outsider of the big tribe or more small tribe folk. If they introduce larger casts for more episodes to see them, we will see nothing than more time for a bunch of redshirts to get picked off as the chaos you want starts way too late. All the things you think will give you the win are the reasons you will lose, and no amount of idols and advantages will make a meaningful dent in that.

Solution: Have more faith in the contestants. Do not try and hand them things to shake up the game, or force them into line where the easiest way to do things is the opposite of what you want. They have the capabilities to shake things up. Let the tribal phase go on longer. Let them decide what to do. Throw out mutinies, not tribe swaps. Don’t leave things to random chance. Hold their feet to the fire to make choices, don’t throw them in it.

Conclusion

To me, that’s the crux of the argument here. Everyone goes and hugs and congratulates Michael for existing when he’s voted out, and production gives him the damn Ciera music, but cut to Jenna on the jury pointing out no one who voted her out, not even her future boyfriend, paid her any mind when she was voted out and immediately sent to the jury bench without a picosecond to process anything.

I was astonished that they allowed someone commentating on their bias to get through, but then I realized- maybe Survivor is proud of that. Maybe that’s their victory lap, and they don’t care about the effect they’re having on the show because it puts asses in seats and, much like many fans, they think dissenters can shut the hell up.

Maybe they don’t feel a need to fix it. Fixing it at all is not a very hard task.

The thing is, modern Survivor is something that can function better even taking those away slightly. If I wanted to be radical I would drastically reduce or altogether erase them, but seeing as people would sooner get violent than give up even the slightest thing, a slight reduction is all I want.

I highly doubt that a change like this would kill it like many think.

-Cam

P.S. I will be doing a FrankyWatch before next week, this I swear! Survivor NZ is really good. I cannot believe I am saying that, but it is really good.