The ‘Survivor 50’ Finale Was A Dark Omen For The Future

After 50 seasons, Survivor is both a cultural touchstone and a lumbering giant exhaustedly searching for its final resting place. The compellingly nasty, scrappy, oftentimes chaotic "social experiment" in 2000 on the island of Borneo has become a machine that turns a month of competition into a baker's dozen of television episodes that all feel and function more or less the same. The magic of Survivor, which is strange but distinctive and real, occurs when that format and that repetition gets upended. This is often the result of a handful of players who want more from their experience on the show than just a slow march to a predictable ending; the human element, not any kind of clever production trickery, is what makes Survivor different. That magic is why I and other Survivor sickos can name moments like the Black Widow Brigade's kill of Erik on Micronesia, or Parvati Shallow's double-idol play on Heroes vs. Villains, or Jesse Lopez blindsiding his closest ally on season 43, or Operation Italy on 47. There are many others like this—few TV shows offer quite as rich a Remembering Some Guys experience—but what these moments have in common is that they amount to an escape from the mold that Survivor, due to the realities of reality TV but also because of choices made by its producers, has imposed on itself and its players.

This is what drives a lot of entertainment, of course. Moments of random chance or real transcendence during the monotony of a 162-game baseball season, for example, or a 24-episode season of television. Survivor isn't quite a sport and it's definitely not a scripted television show, but it has seemed increasingly confused about what its value proposition is in recent years, and felt especially at war with itself in its 50th season. Over the last 10 or so seasons, the show seems to have pit "good TV" and "good competition" against each other without ever quite settling on the balance that made Survivor good in the first place. Instead, it has become obsessed with the fabrication of Moments, instead of emphasizing the sort of openness and chaos that have created them organically throughout the show's long run.

What, then, will I remember from season 50, the so-called biggest season ever, the one that was In The Hands Of The Fans? Is there a moment of pure thrill or joy to rival any that came in the 49 seasons before? I wouldn't say so. Instead, season 50 played out as a slow-moving horror story in which the villain was the show itself and stalked its victims in a Jeff Probst mask. It's fitting that the most memorable morsel from Wednesday night's finale, in which Aubry Bracco completed one of the worst winning games in Survivor history and won $2 million plus a car for some reason, wasn't a bit of gameplay that happened in Fiji. It wasn't even a funny or entertaining answer from one of the players at the live show. No, it was Jeff Probst, veteran of TV and of Survivor specifically, spoiling the results of his own show to the confusion and chagrin of everyone involved:

That's Probst, presumably running off of an incorrect run-of-show from production, announcing that Rizo "RizGod" Velovic had lost the fire-making challenge at final four to become the final member of the jury, before the show had aired that. The immediate confusion and panic as a shell-shocked Probst says "I'm not even sure what's happened" is humorous enough, as is the panic once the show cut to an awkwardly timed commercial.

It's a shame that it happened, though it was pretty obvious that Rizo would lose to Jonathan Young. Not as obvious as Aubry winning the whole thing, which we all predicted in the pre-finale questionnaire, but obvious enough that the show couldn't even pretend that Rizo had a real shot. Probst's fuck-up made this whole stretch interesting in a car crash kind of way, which is in retrospect the only way it could have been interesting. And then it was back to the plodding march to the finish that season 50 had long since become.

The fact that everything that happened on the finale was so predictable—Tiffany Nicole Ervin went out as the final five boot, then Rizo lost fire, then Aubry won 8-3-0, with Jonathan earning three votes from his pre-game alliance and Joe Hunter earning the most deserved zero-vote finalist title in the history of Survivor—is entirely the show's fault. Thanks to the twists that repeatedly took agency out of the players' hands this season, it was impossible for any of the three players that made Final Tribal Council to articulate their moves in a way that might have swayed the jury. (Jonathan and Joe are also terrible speakers, which didn't help.) Even Aubry struggled to articulate her best move; the one she highlighted at final tribal was taking out Ozzy Lusth, but Jonathan jumped in to (correctly) point out that he started the ball rolling on that one, thanks to a stupid twist. In the end, Aubry won less because of anything she did on 50 than because she was an old school player on her fourth go-around, and the jury was more likely to extend her a lifetime achievement award than it was go with Joe, who everyone seemed to hate playing with, or Jonathan, who probably played the best game of the finalists but couldn't speak effectively enough to defend it, and also couldn't stop pissing everyone off.

The thing is, it's hard to blame Aubry for winning this way, as miserable as she was to watch early on this season and as obnoxiously as she played for the cameras in the home stretch and at the finale. She delivered the most New Era game in the history of Survivor, constantly playing the middle and putting herself in positions where the many twists the show threw at this season couldn't harm her. (The one time she was truly in danger, on the Ozzy vote, she ended up benefiting from a split tribal.) She navigated two split tribal councils, edging out her early-game nemesis Genevieve on the first and Ozzy on the second, and managed to lower her threat level despite being gifted a, sigh, Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol. Aubry also benefited from another player's showy move: Rick Devens' fake idol play at final 13 saved her, as their fates were tied together thanks to, again, the production's Double Duo twist, in which both players would have been eliminated together.

If there was anything extraordinary about her performance it was that, no matter what production threw at her, Aubry was the most capable competitor at rolling with the punches. Aubry is an underwhelming winner on a season stacked with so many great players, but she's the only one who could have won a season structured in this way; if she had been a more interesting player, she would have been taken out by something out of her control weeks ago. Instead, she had little power, made few enemies, and always put someone playing a better game ahead of herself. It might not have for good TV, but it won her $2 million, so who am I to judge?

I imagine it's clear by now that I do not want Aubry's win to become a blueprint going forward, and I was hopeful that the tepid reaction to season 50 might have forced Survivor to confront the ways that the game has turned away from competition and more towards a random number generator. The two-minute trailer for season 51, coming this fall, not only crushed my hopes, but might have turned me off from the whole wretched project:

Who is asking for more twists on Survivor? The show just got done with a season that even the players on the island hated playing in—I'm intrigued by how many eye rolls and little comments regarding the twists the editors left in; it felt at times as if they were laughing in our faces—and the thing production learned from that was to make it worse? During our pre-finale questionnaire, we each answered what we hoped Survivor would learn from season 50 going forward, and it's funny to contrast the four members of Defector's jury essentially screaming for fewer and less arbitrary twists with a trailer promising even more production gimmicks aimed at wresting control away from the players.

I'll still be watching at least through the next season, because I didn't watch almost all of this show in a year to give up that easily, but there have now been three straight mediocre-to-terrible seasons of Survivor with another seemingly on the way. It's starting to feel like the slog of the early 20s, which almost made me give up my watch project. Really, though, this feels even worse, because it's caused by so many unforced errors on production's part. The show, and by extension Probst, seems worryingly out of touch with what makes for good Survivor, despite Probst's claims that he and his underlings do in fact know better. If that sounds familiar, that's not an accident. After all, what is life in 2026 but people in power doing whatever they want for their own benefit and amusement, even in the face of millions of people screaming that they don't want any of it?

That's maybe a bit of a reach, but it is hard to argue with the sense that Survivor has fallen into a trap of its own making, thanks to the inability of the people in charge to see past their own desires. It's their show, so they can do whatever they want with it, but the decline that has followed the rise of The Twist is too noticeable to ignore. One bad season can be a fluke, and two is just a cause for concern, but to flub season 50 this badly, and then to double down on the exact things that made 50 bad in the first place, shows that whatever Probst and co. want Survivor to be is opposed in some meaningful ways to what made Survivor great in the first place. I won't go so far as to say that the show needs to fire everyone and start over, but at the very least, it should put someone in charge that doesn't have an active contempt for the best parts of Survivor. A show that is about the shadowy hand of production guiding players around like action figures might still look like Survivor, but it won't leave any room for the stuff that made Survivor worth watching in the first place.