Survivor was my favorite show for years for these reasons:
- A clever social game: Vote people out and somehow still convince them to give you a million dollars, how do you do that.
- The survival elements: How do modern-world people deal with lack of food and sleep deprivation, and hard physical labor.
- The challenges: Throughout the years they introduced many great challenges that require a diverse skill set. Sometimes it's physical strength, sometimes it's ingenuity or remembrence, sometimes pure willpower. Among my favorites were when players had to build a shelter and a local juror decided which was best (Boston Rob won I think), or one time they had to build a raft that could float on water.
Also, it's family-friendly and my wife and I were looking forward to sharing the Survivor experience with our kids.
But now I'm watching season 41 and there's hardly anything left of the trademark elements that made Survivor this great show:
- Challenges: All are now basically "some parcours with a puzzle at the end" (for teams) and "stand on a platform and balance stuff" (for individual immunity). No diversity, none of the great challenges from previous seasons. Extremely boring to the point where I just fast-forward to see who won.
- Survival: You hardly see players search for food or build shelters anymore. They keep saying they're food-deprevated but somehow it doesn't show. Either the new players are all Bear Gryllz or it has gotten softer as compared with previous seasons where players lost dozens of pounds and sometimes quit because they couldn't take it.
- Social game: It's still the same game but the original strategies that used to be played are now buried under a pile of advantages and idols and idol-nullifiers and super-idols and what not. On top of that, everything now centers around race and identity in Season 41 to the point where players cry about voting someone else out because they have the same racial background, really? It's the 21st century and we're going back to using race and ethnicity as the primal characteristic to judge people? I'm not from the US and I could relate to all sorts of players of different backgrounds throughout the years but this is the exact opposite of inclusiveness that we're seeing right now.
Such a shame that it came to this, they should have canceled after season 40 and be done with it. I won't watch season 42.
