It’s not every show that, 45 seasons in, finds itself bigger than ever before. I mean that literally: For the first time in its run, Survivor has been airing 90-minute-long weekly episodes, a format devised and produced after CBS gave host Jeff Probst and his fellow producers the green light to bump up their programming from an hour (including commercial breaks). The move made some sense: The iconic reality series has maintained unprecedented stability in the ratings, including a successful shift to streaming on Paramount+, and its recent Emmy nomination for best competition program—the first for the show in 17 years, a record gap for the category—suggests a resurgence in critical and industry support. (There was also the matter of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes thinning out CBS’s scripted schedule.) If anything, the expansion felt like a flex. How many series in Survivor’s wake have come, popped with big debuts, and gone? Virtually as long as it’s been on the air, Survivor has appeared in charge of its own future.
Then, in the first episode of season 45, a contestant quit. A few weeks later, another contestant quit. Fans expressed outrage on social media, both at the players and Survivor itself: With so many people applying and wanting to play, to compete for the famed $1 million prize, how could casting have missed the fact that multiple people simply couldn’t crack life out in the jungle? Since the show’s airing, Probst has promised to be harder on contestants who quit going forward—denying them the ritualistic torch-snuffing farewell that both of this season’s departees were granted. Now in conversation with Vanity Fair, Probst admits the quits rattled him.
“I was shocked—I honestly thought the days of somebody quitting were over, and I don’t know why. That conclusion that I came to had nothing to support it,” Probst says. “I started hearing the audience, the fans, and their unhappiness, and I was jolted back into reality, which is: This is really offensive to somebody who watches Survivor or dreams about being on Survivor. It made me realize I have to adjust.” But he pushes back on criticisms of his casting department: “I don’t think there’s any issue with our casting process. I totally see why you would assume that, but if you dove deep into our process, you would realize we know these people very well—and occasionally, somebody just gets overwhelmed.”
The anecdote is instructive for Probst, who’s been with Survivor since the very beginning (that is, more than two decades), and who’s evolved as the face of the franchise as the times have changed. He’s been open about his personal transformation informing Survivor’s growth following its COVID-induced hiatus, which ushered in a “New Era,” now on its fifth season, that more directly speaks to social issues and cultural divides. “Survivor really took on an even deeper meaning to me, which is a chance to remind ourselves what we’re capable of in a grand way, maybe the biggest adventure you could ever get for the vast majority of Americans,” he says. “My personality was shifting into much more uplifting, positive, encouraging.” This is still very much the case for Probst, post-quitting drama, though he sees room for nuance: “You can have a change of heart personally in how you see the world, but you still have to run this show in a way that holds players accountable.”
Even as Survivor throws in new types of immunity idols, competition advantages, and team configurations (called tribes) with every new season, its core premise has remained the same from its inception: A group of strangers gathers on an island, sources their own food and shelter, and votes each other out until one person remains. The combination of that simplicity, and all of the social complexity contained within it—which is to say, the building and fracturing of alliances and bonds and rivalries—has kept it around, beyond imitators and through dramatic changes in the television landscape. On streaming, Survivor is posting Paramount+ viewing gains of more than 30 percent, year over year, and the show regularly trends on X with the airing of a new Wednesday night episode.
“I’ve felt an even more enthusiastic response this season, and I think it’s directly related to 90-minute episodes because 90 minutes allows us to spend more time with the players—you get to know them on a much deeper level, and not just their backstories, but also smaller moments that often reveal so much character,” Probst says. He’s right that the expansion has made room for both the twist-heavy structure that became especially evident in the “New Era,” an inevitable development for a game show trying to stay fresh, as well as the humanistic depictions of camp life that helped make Survivor such a phenomenon in the first place. “That’s the way I see it,” Probst says. “With 90 minutes, we get both.”
CBS has confirmed that season 46, airing in the spring, will also broadcast 90-minute-long episodes. As to what’s coming after that? Probst says he’ll be pushing to know soon. “Speaking candidly, I’ve been asking for [longer episodes] for years. I think we delivered on it, and I think we’ll deliver on it again in 46—and, yeah, I’ll be walking back into the offices at CBS and saying, ‘Let’s go again,’” Probst says. “It would be hard to go back, but if we had to, we certainly can. We’ve done it for 23 years.”
But there’s also something to be said for the show’s many, many recent innovations—some of which viewers found to be detracting from Survivor’s core strengths—finally paying off. The show had instituted a “Shot in the Dark” maneuver for season 41, in which players who feel in danger of being voted out could play for a one-in-six shot at safety from a vote—while sacrificing their own vote at the same time. For years, nothing came of it; this season, Kaleb Gebrewold, isolated without enough allies, played it correctly while his entire tribe had voted against him, leading to what Probst calls “one of the greatest moments in the history” of the show. “If you’re patient, sooner or later the stars are going to align…but one of the complaints I hear often from fans is, ‘There’s too many twists. You should really try a season with no twists,’” Probst says. “Without that uncertainty, Survivor would not still be on the air. If it was simple as, ‘Hey, whoever has five people can vote out the group that has four,’ this game would’ve died 15 years ago.”
This year’s Emmy race for outstanding competition program, voted on by Probst’s industry peers, features shows nominated for, respectively, season 23 (The Voice), 20 (Top Chef), 15 (RuPaul’s Drag Race), 34 (The Amazing Race), and of course, Survivor’s 44. It’s rare for new shows to break in here, in other words, and when they do they usually stick around until they don’t. Survivor fell off in 2006 and never returned until now. “There was a point along the way where we just let it go, and we were bummed that our peers didn’t feel we belonged in the Emmy conversation, but we also know there are lots of great unscripted shows and there’s only so many spots,” Probst says. “I have no idea why we were nominated again.”
As Survivor’s 45th season airs its penultimate episode tonight, after another run proving the show’s ability to stir both passionate enthusiasm and occasional controversy, some clear factors surely made a difference. Probst cites his “long-term view” of growing the show with the times, and we see it working out; on the other side of that coin, the show has deftly infused old-fashioned elements back into the machinery of an episode, even if that’s as simple as spending a few more minutes on quiet camplife. (The show also brought back the “Survivor Auction,” which—if you know, you know.) There’s the freshly diverse, distinctive, ambitious cast, which even after a few unfortunate quits stands out for their hunger and their savvy. And of course, there’s Probst—as close to a constant as American primetime television has had this century.
“Just to be nominated by the people who are in our orbit and do the same kind of shows we do is all you really need,” Probst reflects as we wrap up. “It’s just somebody saying, ‘I see you. I see what you’re doing.’”
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David Canfield
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