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Firing Jeff Probst Isn’t Enough
The game used to be a contest of social, physical, and strategic skill. Now it’s turning into a show about nothing but itself.
What has changed is the audience: The show now attracts a new generation of fans preoccupied with the question of who obtains things fairly and who doesn’t, whether that manifests in nepo-baby discourse or in declaring in every election cycle that corporatism, the media, and the two-party system all reward the wicked. In one season, a player’s pure charisma may trump another’s carefully plotted, chesslike strategy, as when an incredibly winning cattle rancher named J. T. Thomas beat his closest ally, Stephen Fishbach (another corporate consultant), in Survivor: Tocantins. His gameplay (which included constructing a secret spy shack to eavesdrop on conversations, taking off into the woods to find hidden idols, and deceiving and double-crossing close allies) is remembered as the most over-the-top in Survivor history, and he tended to announce his plans as intemperately as a James Bond villain.
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