Survivor Season 39 - 2019

Before we get to the Unpleasantness, let us examine the season’s Core Gimmick. There is a mysterious island that contains giant wooden head statues of two well-regarded past players, along with the actual two well-regarded past players, and periodically one of the actual contestants will arrive to get advice and a chance for a game advantage. This is an interesting way to solve two problems.

First, it is increasingly difficult to put a player like Sandra “The Queen of Survivor” Diaz-Twine or Boston “Boston Rob” Rob into a cast of newbies. As recently as the previous season, we have seen that alumni are correctly viewed as eminently dangerous and ejected as early as possible, and it’s possible that as a result the game is permanently done with the “some returning players vs some new players” cast makeup. But what to do with your growing stable of Survivor talent? Maybe you remove them from the actual game, but bring them along to dispense sage advice and spy on Tribal Council from an official Spy Shack.

This works sometimes, but it feels underbaked. Rob and Sandra have good rapport and their organic interactions with the new cast are fun, but you should not hire Rob Mariano to read words off of a script. The Island Idols didn’t make much of a mark on the game, and left before it ended. I doubt this kind of thing will be attempted again.

But the other problem it tried to solve morphed, as watchers from the future will know, into the Journey: a player is removed from their tribe, taken to a remote location, and subjected to a game that will bestow a boon or a curse. What this does for the producers is generate some good story content, which is needed to pad out early episodes and inject something dramatic into what may otherwise be pretty ho-hum camp life. Nowadays, this role is occupied by the show itself, in the form of unattributed written communication. This works far better than having someone who is not Jeff Probst explain the rules and the stakes. (It also makes me wonder who takes the mantle when Probst retires; I’m not sure if Survivor has a Ken Jennings: someone who is respected for their performance in-game but who also has the showbiz chops and charisma to take on a very heavy hosting role.)

But of course we must talk about the game itself, and unfortunately for everyone, the emergent theme of the season was “sexual harrassment”. At the height of the #metoo movement, at a moment when powerful men were facing overdue reckoning for their treatment of women in their employ, Survivor decided to cast Dan, a Hollywood talent agent who bore passing resemblance to another disgraced Hollywood figure who was in the news at the time, and Dan made short work of being handsy with his female tribemates. Analytical power-player Kellee did not enjoy this attention, and talked it out with Dan in the first episode, but he continued to paw at contestants incessantly. It got so bad that during one of Kellee’s talking head segments a producer pipes up that they might be able to do something to help. Gee, thanks! A title card tells us that producers intervened at this point to warn Dan, and the timing of the edit tells us that Dan doesn’t think we know that when he professes to be hearing about all of this for the first time during Tribal. Naturally, everyone votes out Kellee for rocking the boat. Jeff likes to say that Survivor is a mirror to society, and in this case, it was a perfect reflection of the fact that power structures and material incentives can cause people to tolerate and obscure horrible behavior, even if it threatens them.

This storyline reached a further nadir when middle-aged lifeguard Janet was bamboozled by two younger women into making a move against her game interests due to their own allegations against Dan. These allegations turned out to have been manufactured (or at the very least greatly exaggerated), and Janet had to contend with the fact that for at least two contestants, it was considered valid gameplay to take advantage of people’s heightened sensitivity around sexual harrassment. Janet laboriously dragged the lies out in open air, and managed to hold on until the final vote. Dan was ejected shortly before the finale (the first and I believe only contestant to receive this dishonor) due to further allegations by a crew member, and the edit goes to great lengths, even including footage outtakes with camera crew in-shot, to lay Dan’s many offenses before audiences.

One interesting aspect of watching this show well after it aired is that I am seeing what was on screen without the accompanying discourse milieu, but the live finale sometimes offers morsels of what the public was talking about during the lead-up (we are at this point extremely close to the end of live reunions, so I will enjoy it while I can). I was happy to see from Jeff’s lengthy solo segment with Kellee and profuse apologies on behalf of the entire crew that I wasn’t the only one with a sick feeling in my stomach this entire season. There were a lot of things I enjoyed this time around, particularly Karishma’s journey of self-discovery and confidence and Jamal’s beautiful exchange with Jack about race relations after Jack said something really dumb. But Dan’s icky reign of terror, accompanied by the bizarre semi-presence of Rob and Sandra, make this a season I doubt I will revisit.