I Will Survive

On August 23, 2000, 51.7 million people tuned in to CBS to watch the finale of the summer’s runaway hit, Survivor, in which sixteen ordinary people were marooned on the remote island of Pulau Tiga, off the coast of Borneo, with just enough food and supplies to stay alive for thirty-nine days. The episode would determine which of the two finalists would become the winner—the Sole Survivor, in the show’s parlance—and receive a check for one million dollars.

In one corner of the ring was Kelly Wiglesworth, a young river guide; in the other, Richard Hatch, a ruthless corporate communications consultant. They did not make it to final elimination with the same strategies. Hatch arrived ready for psychological warfare, keenly aware that success in the game would require scheming and secrecy, collusion and exclusion. Wiglesworth, a pragmatist, accepted Hatch’s invitation to join his alliance and dodged potential elimination attempts by winning several immunity challenges. That Hatch was the most clear-eyed about the exigencies of the game did not exactly endear him to others, but he made himself too useful to eliminate. In the first episode, to the wincing disgust of onlookers, he pulled a rat from a trap they’d set and bluntly macheted it in half to use as bait. A crack fisherman, Hatch traded favor for the scarce currency of calories. By the time his fellow contestants realized they should have voted him off the island anyway, it was too late.

The last episode, then, would be a referendum on what behavior was justified in this murky moral universe. Wiglesworth had just voted off Sue Hawk, a trucker from Wisconsin, despite their longstanding alliance and a bond that seemed to transcend the vagaries of strategy. Hawk was stunned by the betrayal. If you were dying of thirst, she told Wiglesworth before the final vote, “I would let the vultures take you and do whatever they want with you with no ill regrets.” Hatch may have been a snake, but Wiglesworth was a rat. “I feel we owe it to the island’s spirits,” Hawk continued, “to let it be, in the end, the way Mother Nature intended it to be: for the snake to eat the rat.” When the final results were announced in front of a live studio audience, Hatch won by a single vote, becoming one of reality television’s most infamous villains. (He would later serve four years in federal prison for evading taxes, including on his winnings.)

Hawk’s monologue, an essential moment in Survivor lore, cuts to the assumed logic at the heart of the show: that whatever unfolds is in accordance with the natural order of things. The castaway fantasy speaks to this, our curiosity about human behavior in its raw, prelapsarian state, and, from one angle, Survivor—a highly produced, meticulously edited game show—revels in the viciousness that we imagine lurking just beneath our civilized exteriors. A quarter of a century later, across 714 episodes comprising over 500 hours of television, 751 contestants have braved infected wounds, heat stroke, sand fleas, parasites, UTIs, dislocated shoulders, and concussions, not to mention the perfidy of other people, in pursuit of the grand prize, which, despite inflation, remains frozen at one million dollars. Survivor is now on the verge of debuting its fiftieth season amid a deluge of promotional fanfare, including the promise of cameos from the likes of Billie Eilish, Jimmy Fallon, and MrBeast.

No season has commanded the same level of attention as the first, but the show has remained a stronghold in the diminished landscape of network television, spawning some fifty international spinoffs and a dedicated ecosystem of forums, social media accounts, podcasts, fantasy leagues, and live watch parties. It has achieved something like the cultural status of a successful, if niche, sports league (in terms of viewership per episode, it doesn’t do football or basketball numbers, but it has the NHL’s hockey games solidly beat). The membership of the main Survivor subreddit rivals the population of a midsize American city, and there is more than one website devoted exclusively to Survivor news.

As I write, Surviving Tribal is dishing about season forty-nine’s “cheat gate,” while Inside Survivor is busy analyzing stray comments from host Jeff Probst on the show’s official podcast, On Fire with Jeff Probst. Chatter and speculation about the new season abound: Did you hear about Jeff’s wacky idea for the reunion? What was so great about Genevieve’s strategy anyway? Will producers finally bring back challenges where contestants are required to physically attack each other?

How to interpret the enduring appeal of Survivor amid an overabundance of reality television? In her book The American Mirage, the political scientist Eunji Kim argues that competition reality shows have served to bolster the shared fantasy of meritocracy in a country with diminishing prospects for social mobility. In a country where reality television is more popular than political journalism, Kim writes, “This tale spun by entertainment media—that the American Dream is alive and well—is directly counter to the somber headlines touted by the news media.” When it comes to Survivor, there is certainly some truth to this theory; it has always fetishized Horatio Alger-style grit and determination, and much of its diverse fanbase is likely soothed by the idea that even seemingly normal people can overcome the forces of nature and best the odds to win. But a belief in meritocracy is not required to become hooked on Survivor’s warped pleasures.

The premise of Survivor is simple: eat or be eaten. But an army of producers and editors maximize suspense and intrigue by engineering group dynamics with mathematical precision and by constructing elaborate sets that turn the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji (the sole shooting location since season thirty-three) into a giant board game. The “castaways” begin in “tribes”—some named using words from a local language, others according to themes like “Brain vs. Beauty vs. Brawn” and “Heroes vs. Villains”—that compete with each other in challenges that take the form of obstacle courses, puzzles, quizzes, mazes, and, in earlier days, the consumption of insects and food otherwise undesirable to the American palate, as well as the occasional bout of violence. The losers are sent to tribal council, where, flanked by flaming tiki torches, they must decide who to eliminate. As their numbers dwindle, players search the surrounding wilderness for hidden immunity idols, form alliances, betray one another, and bicker over the equitable distribution of labor and resources.

As with all reality television, Survivor’s goal is not necessarily to produce admiration but to produce opinions: any strong feeling in response to what happens on the screen, positive or negative, is the grist for its ratings mill. Fans still refer with gleeful incredulity to a moment in season seven when Jonny Fairplay (né Jon Dalton) conspired to garner sympathy by faking a scene in which he receives news of his grandmother’s death. “My grandmother’s sitting home watching Jerry Springer right now,” he later admitted to a camera in a confessional. To dyed-in-the-wool enthusiasts, the most famous player is probably Rob Mariano, known as Boston Rob, whose mob-boss tactics have inspired years of debate (in one season, he established total surveillance within his alliance through a “buddy system” that prevented his cohort from shifting loyalties).

This moral ambiguity is typical of Survivor’s most legendary players, who tend to be villains or antiheroes: the hardened opportunist Sandra Diaz-Twine, the eccentric egomaniac Benjamin Wade (known as Coach), the backstabbing liar Tony Vlachos, the deadly seductress Parvati Shallow. Though Survivor signals that it is concerned with depicting life outside of society, it is, first and foremost, a microcosm of capitalism, where the shamelessly self-serving are often rewarded. Everyone is compromised, and one can’t help but appreciate the players who navigate the ordeal with pluck, as when Shallow formed the Black Widow Brigade with three other women in season sixteen and took out the three remaining men one by one, securing their positions in the final four.

Some parts of the fandom are exceedingly technical in their appreciation. An elaborate method called edgic—a portmanteau of editing and logic that is believed to have been coined on a forum called Survivor Sucks in 2002—uses a system of acronyms, ratings, and color-coded charts to analyze players across episodes with maniacal rigor. Practitioners believe that, if they can trace the patterns closely enough, they might be able to predict winners as early as the first half of a season. A purely heroic character type, for instance, is not necessarily sufficient to peg someone as a champion; according to some theories, characters whose edits are often labeled “CP” for “complex personality” seem to have the best chances. It’s far from a foolproof system, but part of the fun is the endless potential for interpretation and discussion as practitioners try to trace shifting patterns in how the show’s editors mold the audience’s perception of individual players.

An analysis of season forty-six considered whether “complex personalities” with a “neutral tone” have the same power they once did, while two fans on Reddit parsed the challenges that the editors must have faced in season forty-eight when Joe Hunter, a preternaturally sympathetic fire chief and father of two, displayed all the qualities of a heroic but imperfect protagonist—probable winner material—but received only one jury vote when he made it to the final three. These strategies lay bare the underlying logic of competition reality shows in general, placing their artifice under a microscope. In recent years, the edgic subreddit has expanded its interest to similar shows, such as The Traitors and RuPaul’s Drag Race.

And, as of last year, it is now possible to place wagers on the betting platforms Kalshi and Polymarket for the winners of new Survivor seasons. On those two platforms, the pools for season forty-nine grew to a combined total of over three million dollars. (The markets had the winner pegged from early on, and her odds rarely dipped below 70 percent.) Bets on season fifty began more than a month before the series premiere date, and a mysterious consensus has emerged that Aubrey Bracco is the likeliest winner, with her odds around 70 percent in pools totaling nearly three million dollars without a single episode having aired. (Redditors are debating whether this is the result of leaked insider knowledge.)

It is perhaps this sort of viewer—the quantitatively inclined fan who follows Survivor like the NFL—who is supposed to be pleased with the changes that mark the show’s New Era, an initiative launched in 2021 by Probst and the other producers to both reinvigorate the game and meet pandemic-era restrictions. The New Era has, for better or for worse, accentuated the show’s technical appeal. Its first season, forty-one, aired that September after an eighteen-month hiatus, with a shooting schedule that had shrunk from thirty-nine to twenty-six days. With a faster pace and less downtime, interpersonal annoyances would have less time to fester, so the show needed other ways to engineer tension. Probst decided to increase complex, destabilizing elements of gameplay that incentivize players to chase advantages, make risky decisions, and shift loyalties. Crucial supplies like rice, flint, and fishing gear can now only be earned through challenges rather than issued to each team from the start. The game itself has now taken on the complexity of a chess match between grandmasters.

At the same time, the casting process—which had at times relied heavily on recruiting for particular types to exacerbate tensions—shifted to selecting devotees of the show who study it like the Bible and apply with a hunger to participate. Although the New Era casts are more racially diverse, a welcome change brought on by a general mandate from CBS, they are more likely to come from white-collar backgrounds. They tend to arrive with knowledge of basic strategies: form relationships of convenience early and often; find opportune moments to eliminate players who are “threats”; if your background (a career as a lawyer or stuntman, an Ivy League education, etc.) suggests a certain prowess, consider lying about it; drag at least one weaker player (a sacrificial “goat”) to the end to increase your chances of landing on top; avoid making decisions based on vendetta or irritation; collect a roster of “big moves” for your “Survivor résumé” to sell as the jury interviews you. So while the game itself has become more complex, the show has become more rote, less compelling; an anodyne sportsmanship often prevails.

This combination of calculation and composure in its players, along with a more polished visual production style, gives the New Era a slick, corporate feel. Over the course of twenty-five years, it was perhaps inevitable that the format has had its sharp edges sanded down, becoming, like RuPaul’s Drag Race, a well-oiled institution, each season increasingly indistinguishable from the last. The beaches of Fiji where the show has been shooting since 2016 are well-trod and temperate. The challenges, which once included people shoving each other into bodies of water, are marvels of engineering, competently shot but increasingly similar to one another.

But the proliferation of Survivor watch parties suggests that the show persists as something of a communal gathering place. After imbibing a potentially lethal dose of episodes alone in my apartment, I attended a watch party of the season forty-nine finale at a gay bar in Brooklyn and found my interest reanimated among a crowd of enthusiasts. The show’s editors have become fond of dramatic slow-motion shots of players in the throes of total exertion, and I had wondered if this lack of subtlety exemplified a degradation of the game’s scrappy style, but the room exulted when a shot of this kind showed the beleaguered Kristina Mills crawling through the mud and flinging it from her face with an expression of resolve. To a room full of fans feeding off of one another’s investment, the formula seems to work.

The hosts of the party still expressed skepticism toward the gimmicky contrivances of the New Era, but the knowing critiques of producers and players were clearly part of the pleasure of taking in the show. If the New Era lacks in the intrigue that villains brought to older seasons, it may be that the producers themselves have come to inhabit their role, inspiring the kind of affectionate annoyance that keeps fans chattering. The producers, however, appear to be listening. For season fifty—the theme of which is “In the Hands of the Fans”—Probst has asked viewers to fill out surveys about their preferences for Survivor’s future, and their results will determine major decisions about the season’s production.

Opening up to fan feedback could usher in the next set of tweaks that prevents Survivor from going stale, but democracy does not guarantee unity. The ability to participate might only increase the fervor with which the show’s choices are inspected and contested. Ceding some power to the fans is arguably one more manifestation of the fact that the show’s highest authority is the market, with its capricious demands. If Survivor can be said to have any defining sentiment, it may be futility—producers can’t predict precisely what setup will create maximum drama within their budget constraints in the same way edgic enthusiasts can’t predict every outcome. Sometimes the rat gets away from the snake.