Survivor Season 30 - 2015

I like seasons with good casts, and I like seasons where the tribes take on a character, so I liked this season.

Survivor has experimented with Class Warfare before, with the big gimmick of Fiji being that one tribe would be better fed and more comfortable, with the results being predictable and not extremely telegenic. This time around, the tribes are evenly matched, but the makeup of each is determined by players’ job titles. The White Collar tribe is corporate freaks, the Blue Collar is made up of salty laborers, and the No Collar tribe is pure vibes.

Even before individual characters emerged, each tribe had a pronounced set of strengths and weaknesses. The white collars were experts of the strategic game, but chronic overthinkers and bad at camp (no one to delegate to!). The No Collars were very good at the social/emotional gameplay (standout contestants Joe and Jenn win the “I would have a beer with them” award) but flighty with alliances. The Blue Collars were challenge beasts, which gave them overwhelming advantage at the merge, pulling along a few defectors from the other tribes to create a juggernaut majority.

The blue collars were also emotionally stunted, with a very mean streak. Several players said some not great things about women, and one was so bad that Jeff devoted an entire segment in the jam-packed reunion show to it. You do not want that to happen. The effect of this was that players I didn’t necessarily like, like zealous oil driller Mike and “I’m going to walk around with just a bikini top” Yahoo exec (?!!) Shirin, became the underdogs agains a deeply unlikeable dominant faction. Rodney, a dumb loudmouth Bostonian contractor, was a primo Rat Boy, using his dead sister to form early emotional bonds in a nakedly opportunistic way and complaining that no one would give up their reward for him on his birthday. At the end, Mike used challenge wins and an idol to make it to the end, and thankfully saved us all from having to watch one of those doofuses win.