survivoring
before we begin…. Please, please take none of what follows as a defense of any of the Jons who would pompously claim themselves equipped to saving America via podcast. I am simply reporting the facts and reflecting on the grim implications these facts bear for the stunted current state and increasingly troubled future of our most enduring cultural institution, CBS’ Survivor.
I write to you from my desk on Thursday1 because tomorrow morning I’ll be on a plane2 to the desert for a weekend celebrating the wedding of most beloved friends. I write to you from my desk job on Thursday3 also because I need to speak out on the absurd piece of television that was aired nationally last night.
I am not a Survivor pervert or anything. It’s best to clarify this at the outset. Many of its most dedicated fans—a demographic which now constitutes basically the entire pool CBS casts the show from, creating a sickening ouroboros of meta circle-jerking… but more on this later—proclaim the reality TV competition to be the greatest game and I know that’s baseball or, alternately, this board game I like where you have to put historical events in chronological order. Megan, a longtime viewer with an excellent and very useful Best Seasons list she has generously and forcefully offered to many friends, started me on Survivor two years ago and we’ve long since finished the journey through the entire catalog. I liked it a lot! A generous handful of seasons are truly wonderful, a few are incredibly dull and, as is the case with most reality TV, the vast middle terrain is occupied by many seasons that are easy to enjoy and harder to remember.
Survivor is a single good idea—send twentyish people from a carefully selected range of backgrounds all to live together on a beach and make them drink mugs of blood or wrestle underwater then conspire to evict each other from that beach and all this building to a grand climax where the losers get to decide which of the last players standing gets a million dollars….. fantastic! ! —which can be alternately elevated or squandered by casting decisions and production contrivances. For a very long time, CBS managed to churn out considerably more successes than failures. Why, then, has this once venerable fixture in American life devolved into a glorified Outward Bound retreat for maladjusted adults? Does Jeff Probst have the same kind of brain worm that RFK Jr. had but without the necessary mercury level in his blood to defeat it? Is CBS penny-pinching so hard on the production of this show that everyone who understands the appropriate tone for the show have quit and gone to woodworking school so as to be useful in the end days? Is Gen Z just bad at being on TV? Did I fall into an alternate universe where the point of a teality television competition show is the personal growth and development of its participants? Is this because of “woke”????????????
So anyway the problem is that the TV show Survivor now casts almost exclusively people aged 23 to 34 whose main occupation in life is thinking about the TV show Survivor and/or “content creation” and then they come on the show and cry about how they were the only person not invited to Sarah Wilson’s birthday party in 7th grade and what’s worst of all is Jeff Probst supports and celebrates this instead of grimacing in a way that is also laughing and brusquely moving forward as he would have ten years ago. That man has gone soft and in turn the show has lost the fierce competitive spirit which is required to make it anything more than a glorified camping trip. Add to this soggy, mindnumbingly boring casting mode an unending series of new twists and advantages which only distract and detract from the strategic gameplay and complex interpersonal relationships which are what made Survivor great in the first place and suddenly most episodes—each of which CBS recently expanded to ninety minutes as if they were not inflicting sufficient suffering on their audience—are an infuriating slog through heavy-handed sob stories and stupid, conflict obliterating “twist” reveals.
Now, though, I’m on a plane. My ears are painfully clogged and I’ve had seven Altoids and before takeoff the flight crew congratulated us on Shohei Ohtani’s historic 50 home runs, 50 stolen bases season. Survivor isn’t very good now but when that Pod Jon told his Gen Z tribe mates that he lives in LA one girl instantly went, “Oh, WeHo?” in a tone that lured from my frame a scream of primal delight. Sometimes the real Survivor is the deeply funny homophobia we encounter along the way. He doesn’t live in WeHo but he did become the first person eliminated from the game when his youthful tribe decided they would rather have a long-haired “AI research assistant” who laid down in the sand during the first immunity challenge and cried that nobody claps from him when he chops open a coconut, marking Survivor as the only place where elder millennials are experiencing genuine discrimination besides inside the minds of women on Instagram who think their no show socks are going to be confiscated from them at gunpoint.
I guess I would have more to say about this but I’m on a plane. Jeff Probst the time will come when you will feel my wrath. But now out the window I can look down at clouds above red mountains and roads or dried riverbeds like snakes and most importantly here in my seat I can eat Chex-Mix. Happy lesbian wedding weekend to those who celebrate. Wish me luck in Survivor fantasy league and also Shohei, I love you.
no longer the truth.
we are in fact flying right now. I disgusted my beautiful girlfriend by paying eight dollars for wifi.
again this is not true. much of what follows was written in the past.