Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: CBS
So much of the chatter about Survivor 50 thus far has been about the cast’s composition. Are there too many players from recent seasons? Are there too many players who are on their fourth, fifth, or sixth seasons? With the Survivor 50 premiere upon us, it’s time to turn the corner. It’s no longer a matter of who deserves to be here, but rather how well they stack up against one another. One of the most frustrating things about Survivor all-star seasons is that, often, the players we are most excited to see back are also the players who pose the biggest threat to their fellow contestants. And so you end up with a Survivor: All Stars in which Tina Wesson, Richard Hatch, and Rob Cesternino are voted out pre-merge. Or a Survivor: Game Changers in which Sandra Diaz-Twine, Tony Vlachos, and Malcolm Freberg likewise get voted out pre-merge, and then we end up with Brad Culpepper and Troyzan Robertson in the finale.
It’s not a purely negative thing, of course. Boston Rob and Amber made it to the end of All-Stars because they were an unbreakable romantic pair, yes, but also because in the early weeks, nobody was particularly threatened by Amber. Parvati Shallow is a legend now, but her road to victory in Micronesia was paved by alliances with people who’d seen her as nothing more than a flirt in her first season.
Of the 24 cast members who make up Survivor 50, there are plenty whose skills set them up as a huge threat, either for their strategic minds, their willingness to backstab, or their likeability factor. After reviewing their past-season performances and watching the preseason interviews with, in particular, Rob Has a Podcast’s Mike Bloom, I’d place these cast members in the following order of most to least threatening.
The most dangerous stretch in a Survivor all-star season is that first couple days before the players have a chance to build relationships. Here, they’re most at the mercy of preexisting reputations. If they have to go to Tribal Council in the first episode, players with high threat levels may not have the time to work themselves out of this straitjacket of their own making. Survivor 50 casting 24 players means it’s likely that two players will get eliminated in each of the first few episodes. (The most players ever cast for a previous season has been 20, and they’ve never had more than 18 for the current 26-day format.) With tribe immunity at a premium in these early episodes, the targets may well be the players known as brainy schemers rather than brawny athletes.
All this adds up to alarm bells for a player like Survivor 47’s Genevieve Mushaluk. Among the “new era” players brought back for 50, Genevieve has the biggest reputation for being a Machiavellian schemer. After playing 4-D chess to oust her early-season ally Kishan and helping to mastermind the intricate “Operation Italy” at final seven, Genevieve was positioned by the show’s edit as a cold-blooded strategy shark. Similarly, Survivor 48’s Kamilla Karthigesu was shown to be an enthusiastic operator keen to pull a fast one on her tribemates. While Kamilla could spin her endgame alliance with Kyle Fraser as proof that she’s worth keeping as a (possibly secret) ally, the pregame interviews have revealed a widespread wariness among the all-stars toward Kamilla.
Then there’s Rick Devens, whose reputation coming off of his fourth-place finish in season 38’s Edge of Extinction is less of a coldly calculating snake than a perpetual-motion machine whose strategizing and idol-hunting has the 50 returnees already exhausted at the thought of playing with him.
In the very first Survivor: All-Stars, Jenna Lewis went hard after former winners Tina and Ethan, making the case that none of the other returnees wanted to see anyone win a second million dollars. Tina went home first. In the years since, Survivor has crowned a few repeat winners, but Jenna’s argument remains an easy one to rally behind. This puts the crosshairs on three players: Dee Valladares, Kyle Fraser, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Savannah Louie. Since Savannah’s season hadn’t yet aired when the 50 contestants left home for Fiji, nobody but she and her Survivor 49 ally Rizo knew for sure that she had won. Even so, the 50 contestants did the casting math and have zeroed in on Savannah as the likely third winner.
It’s possible that Dee, Kyle, and Savannah can make the case that they’re good allies to take to the end, since a jury would be less likely to reward them again. But smart players won’t want to risk another Sandra Diaz-Twine Heroes vs. Villains situation, in which Pearl Islands winner Sandra bluffed about how little of a threat she was all the way up until she won. With the trio of winners spread out evenly over the three tribes, the best chance any of them have is to be on the winning tribe during the early immunity challenges.
As a Survivor legend on par with no one in terms of how beloved she is and how big of a moment it would be for her to finally win U.S. Survivor, it makes sense that Cirie Fields would be in a tier of her own. Over the course of four previous seasons, Cirie’s threat profile has become increasingly multilayered: She’s played the quiet game and the aggressive game; she’s been a cutthroat Black Widow and a nurturing Mama Bear; she’s made big moves that backfired, and she’s been eliminated with no votes against her. The only thing she’s never done is win. And if she somehow, on her fifth try, finally gets in front of a jury, there’s no way any group of people who love this game will be able to resist handing her the grand prize. Which is why 23 people have one imperative above all else: Don’t let Cirie make it anywhere near the finale.
You’d think Cirie’s one path forward in this game would be to wield her icon status and convince a bunch of these young players who spent their grade-school years watching her on TV to get onboard with her. But new-era Survivors show their love and appreciation by voting your ass out, so … maybe not.
For most players, if you’re getting brought back to Survivor as an all-star, you have some degree of cunning in your game. It’s just a matter of making relationships with people who see that cunning as advantageous to them rather than threatening. If a schemer can keep their visibly strategic gameplay to a low simmer, they can last long enough to forge good alliances. As a mom figure who made it to the end of her season by playing an aggressive strategic game (not to mention winning four immunities), Chrissy Hofbeck is someone who has as many players wanting to oust her as want to align with her. If she hits the beach and starts playing too hard too soon, she’ll probably make herself a target. Christian Hubicki’s brainy robotics-professor routine made him a huge threat on his original season, but I think the fact that he was dispatched before his season’s finale will make the players on 50 less afraid of him and more able to vibe with his quirky-but-friendly personality.
Aubry Bracco is the kind of player who terrifies a certain (male) demographic of Survivor alumni. Q infamously based his distrust of her on one of his original-season tribemates’ naming Aubry their favorite Survivor. But Aubry’s reputation as a shrewd strategist is almost entirely based on her first-season performance; in two subsequent seasons, she’s seemed noticeably less dynamic and minimally effective. Dare I say she went out with a whimper in Edge of Extinction? Her threat level will likely depend on which version of Aubry still sits most prominently in her competitors’ minds.
And then there’s Emily Flippen, who became an unlikely fan favorite in Survivor 45 as viewers (and her fellow players) came around to her blunt personality. Emily’s proved to be a smart strategic player who nonetheless got eliminated before the finale, which should help tamp down her threat level. But with how abrasively she came across to her tribemates in her season’s early going, Emily will need to make a better first impression.
These players are probably a lot more fun for viewers to watch on TV than to live and play a game with. Angelina Keeley was too much in the best ways on David vs. Goliath, bartering with Probst for rice and asking for the jacket of the woman she just voted out. She also drove her tribemates crazy, enemies and allies alike. In the pre-interviews, there’s a viscerally negative reaction to the prospect of working with Angelina, especially from old-schoolers like Colby and Ozzy. Of course, keeping a player like Angelina around for the long haul could be beneficial for players who would like to sit in front of a jury next to someone who drives everybody else batty. (This is essentially what happened in her original season.)
The other major chaos agent is Quintavius “Q” Burdette, who wasn’t just merely aggravating to his tribemates with his vainglorious attitude; he was an active threat to their game. As a player, Q was erratic, illogical, and self-destructive — at one point requesting to be voted out at Tribal Council. This made life hard for anybody who wanted to align with him. As entertaining as he can be — and as much as the folks on 50 might want to use him as a diversion to hide their own maneuverings — it’s hard to imagine anybody would willingly align with Q long-term.
As two of the three cast members in their 20s, Charlie Davis and Rizo Velovic represent the youth. And if there’s anything old-schoolers hate, it’s youth. Charlie and Rizo both present differently, of course: Charlie’s reputation is the guy who’s able to play the middle all the way to the end, who gets everybody to like him but is willing to make a move against anyone. This makes people wary of him, though probably not enough to target him right away. I suppose the Survivors could be wary of ousting Taylor Swift-obsessed Charlie so early and incurring the wrath of his fellow Swifties, but recall how quickly the folks on The Traitors got over that fear and bounced Donna Kelce.
Rizo, on the other hand, talks a huge game, wants to make big moves, and pulls stunts with fake immunity idols at Tribal. Most of these antics aired on TV long after Survivor 50 filmed, but the cast did see the season 49 preview that aired at the end of the season 48 finale — you know, the one that ended with Rizo’s “the man, the myth, the legend, R-I-Z-G-O-D RizGod, baby” catchphrase. It might be hard for Rizo to un-ring that bell.
With 12 players selected from the first 39 seasons of Survivor and the other 12 from the so-called new era, it was not surprising to see an old-school-versus-new-school division assert itself repeatedly during pre-interviews. While this dynamic mostly comes down to which season(s) you were on, it’s occasionally more like a state of mind, one that’s been annoyingly flattened to “old-school players value fixed alliances, winning challenges, and playing with honor” versus “new-school players play a godless game of fast betrayals and constant upheaval of the tribal order.”
In the former camp, you have players like Colby Donaldson and Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick, whose popularity in their original seasons helped lend them the air of stubborn righteousness they carry into the game today. This old-school strategic conservatism may make them attractive to keep around in the long term, since you can count on them to stay loyal. The downside is that the new-era players may bump up against their unwillingness to play a more cutthroat game.
Two new-era members of the 50 cast who competed in a decidedly old-school manner are Jonathan Young and Joe Hunter. Jonathan is the quintessential Survivor “challenge beast,” who seemingly everybody wants on their initial tribe so they can cruise through the first half of the game on immunity-challenge wins. He’s also a player whom everyone will likely try to get rid of at the merge. Joe’s threat profile is less stark. Where Jonathan’s dominant reputation is one of being good at challenges but bad at forming social bonds, Joe’s reputation is a kind of sentrylike stoic loyalty. Whether Joe’s unbreakable bond with Eva in his original season is something that will translate to one of his new tribemates or if it was specific to Eva alone is one of the more intriguing questions for the early Survivor 50 episodes. Either way, my guess is people will try to ride with Joe early and jettison him later in the game.
If Colby and Stephenie represent the stoic conservatism of the old-schoolers, Jenna Lewis-Dougherty and Ozzy Lusth seem more willing to mix it up with the young ones. Both players were the young ones on their original seasons, after all. Jenna is the sole representative of the original Survivor cast, which should get all the superfans of the new era eager to work with her. Her threat profile will depend almost entirely on her energy when she hits the beach. She has a history of alienating tribemates early on by doing (or just talking) too much. Her preseason interviews suggest that Jenna has not lost this quality.
Ozzy, meanwhile, is back for the fifth time, and is the only person to have played U.S. Survivor four or more times and made it to at least the merge/jury all four times. While far from a liability in challenges, he’s not the half-man-half-dolphin threat he once was, which makes him less intimidating. He’s never had the best social game, which also makes him non-threatening when it comes to long-term alliances. I could see him going far if he can latch onto an alliance of new-era players.
Strictly speaking, it’s not odd that Mike White is such a popular figure among the Survivor 50 players. As the creator and showrunner of one of HBO’s most high-profile hits, his celebrity transcends the reality-TV sphere, and his penchant for casting his former David vs. Goliath tribemates in bit parts on The White Lotus has his new tribemates more starry-eyed than I think they’d like to admit. What’s odd is how many players seem to be ignoring how much of a threat Mike is. (Though not everyone: Emily has stated that she wants to target Mike specifically because everybody else will be trying to cozy up to him for White Lotus reasons). So many 50 contestants talk about how great it is that Mike is out here playing for the love of the game rather than the prize money, seemingly unaware of how much this narrative could work for him in front of a final jury.
But for as much as Hollywood Mike has his castmates singing his praises, there is nobody more beloved by the Survivor 50 cast — at least if you go by the preseason chatter — than Benjamin “Coach” Wade. The self-professed “dragon slayer” and practitioner of oceanside tai chi has players young and old positively giddy to not only play alongside him but work with him. In a season with Cirie, Colby, and Ozzy, there is no comparison to the delight and joy these 50 cast members possess when talking about Coach. I’m at a bit of a loss to explain it, but everything that made Coach seem like an insufferable, delusional legend in his own mind across his three previous seasons has aged like fine mead in an Arthurian goblet. He’s the superstar of this cast and completely unthreatening to anybody except Jenna, who is targeting him on pro-dragon grounds only.
The 23 players mentioned above have qualities that play either into or against their threat profile. But they all burned an impression of some kind into their fellow players’ heads. Then there’s Tiffany Ervin, who has one of the most perfect under-the-radar profiles of any Survivor returnee ever seen. Tiffany was by no means a wallflower on her original season. She was a confessional queen whose social relationships with players like Q and Kenzie formed the backbone of season 46. But as a player, she’s mostly unmemorable. She was strategic but not splashy, loyal but not blindly so, and her biggest move of the season was rallying the jurors to vote for Kenzie at the end, something that never made it to TV. On season 50, her most threatening quality comes from the fact that there are three Survivor 46 cast members on the show, making her, Q, and Charlie a trio that might need to get broken up. But there are two other trios this season (Kamilla/Kyle/Joe from 48 and Mike/Angelina/Christian from David vs. Goliath) that worked far more closely together in their original seasons. Moreover, Q and Charlie are pretty good shields for Tiffany if the 46ers are indeed targeted.
From the pre-interviews, nobody has any strong opinions on Tiffany, with several players seeming to struggle to find anything to say about her at all. This is perfect for her. She’s the ultimate easy ally. At least in the early stages, she’ll be the least threatening of target options. And in a season peppered with Survivor legends, Tiffany hasn’t peaked yet. She’s positioned to do so now.
Dee Valladares is the third.
Parvati was voted out before the merge in “Winners at War,” but on that season, everybody made the jury.