March Makeovers: Should we look ahead to ‘Survivor’ season 33?
“Survivor” is amazing. Why in the world would anyone want to change it? We get that sentiment and then some. We’ve long made it clear that there is no other reality show we get as excited to see, even more than a decade and a half after it first premiered. The locations are beautiful, Jeff Probst is fantastic as a host, and the strategy is to-notch and well-edited.
Yet, it is our priority in this March Makeovers article series to be rather critical, and that is what we’re going to do here in trying to point out what are a few things that this show really could do to try to take things up a notch.
What is going wrong – Compared to other shows, there’s really not much since this show consistently has some of the best producing and casting in TV. With that being said, there are a few issues. First, you have a little bit of a casting problem where you cast too many young, twenty-something women who all claim that they want to play like Parvati Shallow. This season has at least been a little better in that regard (Anna, Liz, Michele, and Julia are all interesting), but there are still problems there. Also, casting celebrities has really not worked, even if Scot Pollard is doing okay so far.
Also, the show may need to consider something different with the tribe swap. Anna’s elimination earlier this week joins a long line of people who went home and did very little wrong. Look at Aaron in “Survivor: China,” Silas in “Africa,” or of course Kelley Wentworth in “San Juan del Sur” to see examples of people who easily would have lasted longer had they not been screwed.
How to fix it – We almost wish that the show would consider at least trying other tribe-swap ideas, such as maybe giving the Mutiny twist another go where someone can flip to another tribe before any challenge. Maybe nobody would do it, but we want to keep unpredictability while still keeping luck in players’ hands. Another idea is that maybe you revisit “One World” and have better cross-tribal relationships, or at least go back to a pick-’em format where the players have more power.
Other other suggestion that we have that is almost a preemptive strike against future complains is to wait a while to bring anyone back. Yes, we know that this stinks for Caleb and a couple of other players, but if they are good enough they’ll be remembered. “Heroes vs. Villains” was great, but “Caramoan” was a little too soon after that and we’d only say that six or seven of those returning players were people we really wanted to see again.
In the end, we don’t think that there are too many extremely awful crises dooming the show right now. The reality here is that we’re not going to go after them for isolated incidents, much as we may dislike them, or medical situations that are so far beyond what was expected. Sometimes they cannot control weather, and they cannot control what people do after they are already cast. What they can do is look at their influence on the game.
Head over here right now to check out some of our other “Survivor” coverage! Also, sign up over here to get some more TV news on everything we cover, sent right over to you via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: CBS.)