LogFAQs > #951598339

Okay, so Seasons 1-11, the show was basically one format. Bunch of people out in the wilderness, trying to survive, voting each other out, with a couple twists to shfit the game up.

Season 12-18, they started to really push a couple new twists: specifically the hidden immunity idol and exile island. The show was still character-driven, but these two twists really started impacting the show itself, and turning it into a more strategy-focused show.

Season 19, there is a very specific character (who I could probably just openly reveal, but spoilers regardless) who gets the VAST majority of the screentime and the whole season revolves around him, and everything he does is flashy made-for-TV strategy with idols and blindsides. And this character is so prominent that he gets brought back for two of the next three seasons, a relative of his is cast on two future seasons, and a DIFFERENT relative is cast on Big Brother. The show really starts to shift its focus at this point, no longer being about a group of players bouncing off each other, strategically. Instead, it feels more like the producers want that ONE person who's going to dominate strategically and make the whole season revolve around them. Hence 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, and 27 all having returning players. And if that person doesn't exist, then they focus the strategy around a constant stream of idols, and the edit reinforces this as the "right" way to play the game.

Cagayan, after like, eight seasons of failing to get their desired outcome from Samoa, they get what they wanted. But that spoils them, because the events of Cagayan are very much lightning in a bottle. The next three seasons filmed, I enjoy two of them, and the third was done dirty by the editors being lazy as fuck...but the they did not work out the way the producers wanted.

This leads us to the newest era of Survivor. Starting with Cambodia, the show pretty much abandons ANY pretense that the characters matter or that long-term storytelling matters. Instead, the producers start going out of their way to stuff the show full of idols and extra votes and vote steals and other advantages, because to them, it's easier to force the game to be interesting by adding chaos, rather than relying on the players themselves to be dynamic characters. Cambodia was super popular because it was a returning player season, on the heels of a highly-unpopular season, and the fans got the vote who would be in the cast. Producers kinda took the wrong lesson from this and have ever since tried to make every season just like Cambodia. And I would say they've had far more misses than hits since then.

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