Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Emma Chance | TV | January 31, 2025
Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Traitors season three.
First, a confession: I discovered Survivor during the pandemic. I was unemployed, living with my parents, and miserable. I grew up watching competition shows like The Amazing Race and Fear Factor, but somehow missed Survivor entirely. So, with nothing better to do for the better part of a year, I hunkered down and started from the beginning. Now I consider myself a super fan, and I have the Buff collection to prove it. I’d like to think I have a close to an encyclopedic knowledge of the history and characters of the show because such is my obsessive nature and also because I literally get paid to know stuff about reality television, but I’m positive someone’s reading this right now and getting ready to tell me how stupid I am for what I’m about to say.
Oh well. Here goes nothing: It’s time for Boston Rob to retire.
Listen, I like Rob as much as the next person. He’s the best to ever do it on Survivor, hands down. He is an extremely talented and strategic game player, and he’s charming and makes good television, too. Everything he’s ever won has been deserved. But if he wins this season of The Traitors, it won’t be earned. His biggest competition, fellow Survivor winners Tony Vlachos and Jeremy Collins, are already gone, and last night, he successfully got the Faithfuls to banish Wes Bergmann of The Challenge. His only remaining threat at this point is another Challenge guy, Derrick Levasseur. Derrick is gunning for Rob and Rob knows it, but Rob also knows that no one else is on Derrick’s side, and that’s because the non-competition show folks outnumber them, and those people don’t watch enough TV to know who Rob is or how he operates, plain and simple. That is what makes this show so good: most of these people have no clue what they’re doing or who they’re doing it with, and that’s hilarious.
This isn’t the competition show Olympics; this is the reality TV Olympics. This is a show for people like Chanel Ayan, who didn’t even know what Survivor was and thought Boston Rob and Carolyn Wiger had survived famine and drought. This is a show about Alan Cumming and his little dog sidekick living in a castle.
And this is also a show for underdogs. The season one winner was the other best Survivor player of all time, Cirie Fields, but Cirie never managed to clinch the win on Survivor, which made her perfect for Traitors. The people playing with her knew who she was and how good she was, and she still trampled over them all and took all the money. That’s what this show is—not a clinic in strategic gameplay from the Einstein of strategic gameplay, but a campy romp through the Scottish wilderness where the underdogs and the weirdos can finally win. Rob’s a lot of things, but he is not an underdog, and he is not a weirdo.
Carolyn is. She reminds us of it at least once an episode. With Rob gone, she could win. Can’t he just go home and let someone else have a turn?
