'Survivor 50' Has Been a Bust, So Far

Survivor fans have been looking forward to Survivor 50 basically since Tony Vlachos won Survivor 40, so it pains me to say this: the season has been a bust. It doesn’t have much to do with the casting (beyond the fact that some of the most enjoyable players — Mike White, for instance — were voted off early). And it hasn’t really been the gameplay, either.

Survivor 50 is being overproduced to death. An ideal Survivor 50 would have stripped the series down, returned to the basics that made Survivor so good in its best years, and let the game speak for itself.

Jeff Probst and Co. decided to do the complete opposite, knowing, I suppose, that if it failed, they could blame it on “fan voting.” Did fans vote for players to mention the Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol 32 times an episode? Did fans vote for Zac Brown to spend 25 minutes interrupting an episode by spearfishing and playing tunes for the castaways? Did they vote for Jeff to rap? Did they vote for a 10-minute paid promotional for Applebee’s in which Jeff Probst conducted a deep-dive into the chain’s menu? Did I mention the Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol? Because no episode can go 20 minutes without bringing it up again. I have to believe even Billie Eilish is watching from home thinking, please stop saying my name. It is beyond cringe at this point.

And I dread the episode where players are supposed to receive visits from loved ones, but Jeff surprises them with a visit from Mr. Beast instead — and the starving tribe that wins the reward challenge, rather than being handed cheeseburgers and pizza, receives packages of Feastables. I cannot wait to watch Joe and Coach pretend to care on camera.

And this latest turn — the “Blood Moon Twist”? Absolute ass. The fact that they voted off three players in one episode was not the issue; it was well past time to cull the bloated herd. The problem was the execution. There were 17 players left: Ozzy and Rizo were exiled to Exile Island, leaving 15 to fight for their survival. That part was fine. What wasn’t was everything after.

Ideally, all 15 players go to a single Tribal Council — with one to three players immune — and chaos reigns as the top three vote-getters go home. It would have been the perfect mechanism to flush out all those idols and advantages, since no one would have felt safe, and it would have reset the game with 14 players and very few advantages remaining. The mad scramble to form alliances around eliminating three players simultaneously would have been television gold. That has never been done on Survivor. That would have been compelling television.

Instead, the 15 remaining players were split into three tribes of five, each with one immunity winner, each voting out one of their own. Sure, it gave the series an opportunity to stage three Tribal Councils in a single episode, padding the runtime to two full hours — plus the 25 minutes live viewers lost waiting for the President to hiss his way through an embarrassing speech — but the eliminations had less to do with gameplay than with the luck of the draw.

At this stage of the game, alliances are entrenched. If you were the odd one out in your tribe of five, you went home. Two of the three Tribals were painfully predictable. Genevieve was the odd one out in her tribe, and the only real tension was whether a Shot-in-the-Dark would save her (it would not). Coach and Colby were the odd ones out in theirs, but once Cirie signaled that Colby should go, it felt like a foregone conclusion — nostalgia tears and all.

There was some suspense in the third Tribal, where Jonathan found himself in the middle, essentially deciding whether to vote out a New Era player or an old-schooler. To me, that felt foregone as well: Jonathan has been siding with the old-school players all season. The only genuine intrigue is how the New Era players respond to that choice next week.

And honestly, if Rappin’ Jeff and the CBS producers can get out of their own way, the remainder of the season could shape up to be a compelling showdown between the New Era and Old-School factions. There are players worth rooting for on both sides (Cirie and Ozzy; Tiffany and Dee), players worth rooting against on both sides (Coach; Riz), and a couple of genuinely fascinating wild cards in between (Christian and Rick). As it stands, with Joe and Jonathan aligning with the Old-School, it’s roughly 8-4 in their favor — with Rick and Christian as the fulcrum — which means Jonathan chose wisely. But Ozzy and Cirie are leaning New Era and appear to have a working alliance with Christian and Rick, which makes things considerably more interesting.

All of which would be great — if Survivor didn’t detonate a ridiculous twist every other episode, stealing thunder from the one thing viewers actually tuned in to watch: the gameplay.

All hail, Mr. Beast.