Hung Jury

Why the New Final Tribal Council Format Just Doesn’t Work

Given three seasons to watch it unfold, I can now officially come down on the new tribal council format. It’s bad. Maybe the original way doing final tribal council had flaws but it worked better than what they’re currently trying to do.

My biggest gripe with this new format is that it gives too much power to production. They already have the ability to weave together the story they want to create for an entire season, why allow them to also do it with the jury questioning?

During this season’s finale, we saw who Libby, Jenna, Angela, and Chelsea voted for but I couldn’t give you a single fact about why they voted the way they did. Why? Because each of them got zero airtime during final tribal council. They weren’t shown asking a question or giving an opinion. They were barely even shown reacting to the events unfolding in front of them. For a season named Ghost Island, they became the ghosts of final tribal.

Under the original format, we would have at least seen each of them ask a question. Sure, those questions might have been boring or inconsequential but it would have at least given us context clues in regards to their vote. Now that it’s an “open discussion”, if whatever they brought up during final tribal was deemed too boring for TV, editors can just cut them out of the picture and as we saw last Wednesday, that’s exactly what they did.

What that means is that after final tribal council, I could really only conclusively tell you how Chris, Chris, Kellyn, and Sebastian felt about the three finalists. I could have ventured a guess for Des and Donathan. So the editors gave me at best, 60% of the jurors’ thoughts. To me that’s unacceptable.

Another gigantic problem that I have with this new final tribal format is that it allows for strong personalities to take over a jury. If part of the reasoning for eliminating the old format was to erase the grandstanding for certain finalists, this hasn’t fixed any of that. If anything, the new format allows for jurors to champion the player they most want to see win.

Look at Michael’s fervent support of Dom. Anytime Wendell offered an opinion, Michael was there to immediately shoot it down. This isn’t a single season occurrence either. Ozzy professed himself as Brad’s champion on Game Changers and Zeke did the same for Sarah Lacina. On HHH, Joe’s naturally strong personality made him dominate much of the discussion. In contrast, a chill guy like Devon faded into the background when his opinion should have been heard more because he was in the actual game for much longer and had real tangible experiences with how the finalists played.

Just because a player isn’t necessarily a Type A personality, it doesn’t mean that they should be penalized in terms of giving their opinion. This current format stifles those quieter players and instead of encouraging a discourse, which is the supposed intention, it helps highlight certain jurors.

Because of the nature of Ponderosa, that can become even more of a problem in terms of boot order. The early boots are going to spend a lot of time together outside of the game. There, they will form opinions and talk game that the later jurors won’t be around to discuss. Because the late game is so accelerated in comparison to the early merge, you have a bunch of new jurors coming in late to Ponderosa, not having had the benefit of discussing the game with everyone else. Those jurors will naturally feel themselves on uneven footing in an open discussion and thus, will likely talk less even if, as mentioned earlier, they understand the actual current game dynamics more than the early jurors.

I also think that there’s something to be said about the original format and personalities. What Survivor world would we live in without Sue delivering “Rats and Snakes”? What about the great moments like Heidi’s final question in Amazon or everything Todd did in China, especially in regards to Jean Robert’s question? Under the new format, none of those would have occurred and the show would be a lesser product because of it.

Lastly, from a production standpoint, the stubbornness in trying to stick to three talking points, “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast” is annoying. That phrase is a great logo for the show that was created 18 years ago. It should never have been more than that. Why are we trying to pigeonhole this “open-ended” discussion into three categories that often feel like they overlap. What are people really supposed to talk about in the “Outlast” portion? Yeah I’m still playing and you aren’t. Next question.

There will never be a perfect way to do a final tribal council. To me, the way it was before season 34 at least made sense. Everybody had one shot to get something from the finalists that could help said jury make their decision. They couldn’t waste their turn if their vote was really in play. Now, people are free to filibuster all they want without any consequences. You might get some bad questions out of the original format but at least it’s an even playing field.

This was a case of production trying to fix a problem that wasn’t there. They also knew that it would give them a bigger range in which to tell the story they want to tell. All I can ask is that we make the flip back to the original way of doing things. Of course that will never happen, but if we don’t vocalize our dissatisfaction, why are we even on the internet?