I grew up in Kansas, playing sports where you called everybody by their last name, but it was all boys,” Probst says now. He’s been called out on camera: Near the end of a 2020 episode, Sarah Lacina, a past winner and all-star contestant-she’s appeared on multiple seasons-criticized Probst before her tribemates (and the world) for only calling male players by their last names.
“All I can do is try to learn from the players, and try to become a more evolved human in the process.” “It’s a slightly terrifying proposition to think that I’ve spent the last 22 years of my life on television, involved with a show which is really about human behavior, including my own, because I’m sure I can go back to earlier seasons and hear me say things that would make me cringe,” Probst says. Black contestants also went in-depth this past season on unconscious bias, in a strikingly thoughtful back-and-forth that speaks to our current period of social activism and reconsideration.
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The ignorance displayed in earlier iterations, well-intentioned as they may have been, comes down to “the norms and values of the day, on full display.” Speaking about this past cycle’s shift, he expresses eagerness for showcasing incredibly thorny topics. Probst believes Survivor reflects the times. Host Jeff Probst (left) introducing a challenge. At the merge, which occurs midway into the season when the tribes come together, the Black players who remained developed a tenuous alliance based on the social significance of them controlling the game-something that had never happened in any previous season. This resulted in aggressive competition and the emergence of several standout new players. The shooting window was shortened from 39 days to 26, to account for quarantining and precautions, which allowed Probst and his team to safely intensify the elements-less food, harsher conditions, higher stakes. Survivor returned for season 41 last fall with, inarguably, one of its most diverse casts-multiple players were also LGBTQ+-as well as one of its most dynamic. “We can’t swim…we butt heads, we’re athletic, but maybe not smart and strategic,” as first-season contestant Ramona Gray Amaro described the stereotypes she and other Black contestants were boxed into. Former contestant Rob Cesternino, who now hosts a popular Survivor podcast, invited 12 Black alums representing two decades’ worth of gameplay on his show in July 2020, for a complex discussion on the harmful stereotypes, lack of diversity, and racist encounters they experienced as part of the show. This was instituted in the wake of the protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which spurned a reckoning over the checkered racial history at many American institutions, Survivor included. In November 2020, CBS announced it had mandated that all of its reality series-also including other legacy programs like The Amazing Race and Big Brother-feature casts that are 50% BIPOC, with greater representation required behind the scenes as well. By the time it returned, the entire social fabric of the show had transformed. If you look back at our early seasons, you may cringe-but that is who we were.”īefore the show shut down production during the pandemic, men had won six seasons in a row.
This comes to mind as Probst tells me, 16 years later, “The show is of-the-moment every season. An openly gay man won the first season, watched by tens of millions of people race and sexuality have uneasily existed on the show’s margins ever since, most infamously in 2006’s season 13, which separated contestants in tribes-teams, essentially-by race and ethnicity. Survivor’s great appeal has long rested in its function as a social experiment-throwing 18-odd people in a remote location, from all walks of life, and forcing them to align and oppose, to connect and backstab, as they try to make it to the end and eliminate their competition.