Wednesday night’s Survivor season finale, in which Savannah Louie triumphed over the last-minute surge from Sophi Balerdi, ended with what many of us were really there for: our first look at February’s Survivor 50. And in the span of just two and a half minutes, Jeff Probst took us on a roller-coaster ride through a haunted house of familiar faces, significantly older familiar faces, and some faces we neither needed nor wanted to see.
A little less than a year ago, Jeff announced that the landmark 50th season would be subtitled “In the Hands of the Fans,” both a promise to allow the show’s legion of diehards a chance to mold the game (more on that in a second) and an acknowledgment that this season would be giving those devotees everything they’ve asked for. As a die-hard day-one fan myself, I thought I’d point out what about the trailer gave me thrills and what gave me chills.
Survivor’s eternal gasbag Coach Wade provides a voice-over for the shots of various legs traversing a tarmac to a Survivor-branded airplane bound for Fiji. “I’ll start with a quote from Magellan,” Coach blathers. “‘Life is for the bold to seize the opportunity when it comes, not those poor intrepid souls that stay close to shore. But it is the person that goes out in the storm that reap [sic] the high rewards.”
Coach has never been one to miss an opportunity for self-aggrandizement, and this quote effectively characterizes his three previous Survivor appearances not as failures but as bold attempts to tame a raging sea. Survivor’s tribal councils of late have been awfully fond of Probst and the players indulging in tortured metaphors about the game, so Coach at least appears ready to engage with the current Survivor Zeitgeist.
Colby Donaldson, Probst’s favorite challenge beast of all time, is back for his inexplicable fourth season — despite seeming decidedly checked during his third season, 2010’s Heroes vs. Villains. In the 15 years since, Father Time has done what he’s wont to do, and while Colby doesn’t exactly look like Methuselah out there, the sight of former virile young hunks like him and Ozzy Lusth now in their 50s and 40s is a sobering reminder of our own mortality. “How many more shots am I gonna get?” Ozzy asks in one clip. Indeed, Ozzy. So say we all.
On the other hand, nothing made me feel quite so alive as the sight of Jenna Lewis, this installment’s sole representative from Survivor’s first season. “Season 50’s a celebration of the game that created my entire life,” Jenna says in an interview clip, clad in an ensemble of bright, clashing colors that communicates nothing so much as being an enthusiastic PFLAG mom — I accept your allyship, Jenna! — though I’m gonna need her to stop seeing this season as a celebration and more of an opportunity. As the season’s most-veteran player, she has a chance to be underestimated and dodge the bullets that will fly toward the more obvious threats. Game face, Jenna! We fans from back in 2000 are all counting on you.
If you’ve secretly longed to watch Probst finally put his money where his mouth is and actually compete in Survivor for once, the trailer suggests you might get a small morsel of that this season. We get a brief shot of Probst bearing down on a hand-crank pulley lift, the kind we’ve seen used in several previous challenges. I dearly hope Rick Devens or one of the other players has the wherewithal to shout, “You gotta pick it up!” at him at maximum volume.
When the cast of Survivor 50 was announced several weeks ago, fans and critics alike were puzzled by the overall lack of intentionality. Was this supposed to be a gathering of the greats from across the show’s entire arc? That seemed to not be the case based on the fact that the 24 cast members were divided evenly between pre-season 40 players and players from the most recent ten seasons. So was this a battle-of-the-eras kind of thing? In that case, they might have steered clear of some of the retreads on the veteran side. Getting Ozzy back for his fifth season and Colby, Coach, Aubry Bracco, and Stephenie LaGrossa back for their fourth has an undeniable air of “been there, done that.” And yet, there’s Cirie Fields, back for attempt No. 5, and I can’t begrudge her. She’s been making the reality-competition rounds over the last few years, from Big Brother to a triumph on The Traitors to Australian Survivor. All that’s left for her is to win the game that started it all. And while I have a hard time believing she actually stands much of a chance — no one in their right mind would let her get close to the end, since she’d be such a sentimental favorite to win over any jury — I can’t be truly mad at the chance to watch her play the game again.
Anybody who’d been clued in to casting spoilers knew throughout season 49 that the season’s camera-time champions Rizo Velovic and Savannah Louie were part of the season 50 cast. But when Savannah became season 49’s actual champion as well, she joined Survivor 45 champ Dee Valladares and Survivor 48 champ Kyle Fraser as one of the three former winners in the 50 cast and earned the distinction of being the first winner to come back to play on the very next season.
Survivor 50 filmed only a few weeks after 49 wrapped and long before it aired, so the 22 other players will have had no idea of Savannah or Rizo’s exploits (or their unbreakable bond), beyond what they choose to reveal. That’s a big advantage, one that may counteract the exhaustion that could catch up to them from doing back-to-back seasons.
One of the most annoying aspects of modern-day Survivor is how heavily it likes to lean into its own mythology. The players are all superfans who have revered every idol play and internalized the mechanics of the game in a way that has, frankly, made it less fun to watch. Probst is as bad as any of them about this — look back no further than the amount of airtime on Wednesday’s finale that was spent hollering about Savannah making Survivor history by winning as many challenges as five other women in show history. Only Donald Trump’s finale-interrupting White House address featured louder exhortations of dubiously important statistics.
Enter Q Burdette, Survivor 46’s most enigmatic player, whose strategy befuddled his fellow players and the viewers at home in equal measure. He was also fond of a turn of phrase in his interviews, in particular “cancel Christmas,” a bon mot that didn’t really mean anything but also meant everything. So, of course, Q is back on Survivor 50, and before the season’s even begun, he’s unleashing his “cancel Christmas” catchphrase like he’s a Drag Race All Star with a new single to promote. I’d say this feels like Tony Vlachos returning with ever more Rube Goldbergian iterations on his spy shack, but we know Q is suspicious of such shenanigans.
Probst announces the season’s theme to the assembled all-stars, and everybody is full of gasps and uncertainty. Indeed, throughout Survivor 48’s airing, the show prompted viewers to vote on certain elements of game construction, with the promise that season 50 would be shaped by the fans’ wants and desires.
Well … sort of. A lot of those voting prompts were about cosmetic elements (the tribe colors, the design of the immunity challenge), and several more were so vaguely worded as to render them meaningless (“Would you like there to be advantages with Minimal Power, Strategic Power, or Dynamic Power?”). The most pertinent ones were choosing between a live reunion show in the old pre-pandemic style or keeping the current immediate on-site reunion (the live reunion won out), and deciding whether to keep the fire-making challenge at final four or not (it’s not yet known which option won that vote).
Easily the most disconcerting — nay, infuriating — moments in the trailer were when celebrities were introduced into the game. Country musician Zac Brown pulls up to the beach on a motorboat in one scene, while contestant Christian Hubicki laments at another point that his fate in the game may be decided by Jimmy Fallon, a nod to the late-night host having possibly devised an advantage. Probst has a history of allowing celebrity Survivor fans input in the game, most infamously in Survivor: Cagayan, which featured an entirely too-powerful Immunity Idol dreamt up by Tyler Perry. So seeing Rick plotz over the existence of a “Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol” is both highly troubling and sadly explicable.
The worst moment in the trailer by far is the appearance — heralded by his own logo — of Mr. Beast, the YouTube bazillionaire whose Beast Games has been a hit on Amazon. Not only does this crossover event break a kind of sacred bubble surrounding Survivor, it also lowers the show significantly. For all its faults, Survivor stands as the most influential reality TV show of all time, and to see Probst essentially grovel at the feet of Mr. Beast to get some of his audience share is genuinely icky.
Yeah, okay, fine, I’m at the very least interested in what this might actually mean.
For everything else about this season that feels pandering, the aesthetics remain on point. There’s one slow-mo shot of an immunity challenge — presumably from the season premiere, as these trailers never give anything away that would suggest who survives that first tribal council — of Savannah traversing a balance beam in the foreground while Aubry jumps off a high platform into the water in the background. The contrast between Savannah’s balletic poise and Aubry’s limbs-akimbo descent is the stuff of, as Rizo would likely say, cinema.
Despite numerous slow-mo glamour shots of the likes of Colby, Coach, muscle-bound Jonathan Young, and Mike White in a dad-tastic plaid button-down, so many of the players I’m most excited to see were virtually absent from the trailer unless you really Abraham Zapruder’d your way frame by frame through the clip. Where is my rice-bartering Angelina Keeley, my coldly strategic Genevieve Mushaluk, my financial analyst Emily Flippen, or my real-life Buffalo Bills fan Kyle? That plus only passing glimpses of Dee, screwed-over Swiftie Charlie Davis, and cutthroat mom Chrissy Hofbeck has me genuinely worried that the early eliminations could be a Civil War battlefield of my faves.
Meanwhile, Survivor: Palau fan favorite, Survivor: Guatemala fan less-favorite (if also runner-up) Stephenie is all over this trailer. Stephenie — who has spent time since casting was announced publicly feuding with Survivor alum Eliza Orlins over politics and getting called out for anti-Semitic remarks therein — gets multiple slow-mo glamour shots, suggesting she’s either going to be a major part of the season or the folks in CBS marketing wants their audience to think she will.
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