The ‘Survivor 50’ Finale Was A Dark Omen For The Future

After 50 seasons, Survivor is both a cultural touchstone and a lumbering giant exhaustedly searching for its final resting place. The compellingly nasty, scrappy, oftentimes chaotic "social experiment" in 2000 on the island of Borneo has become a machine that turns a month of competition into a baker's dozen of television episodes that all feel and function more or less the same. The magic of Survivor , which is strange but distinctive and real, occurs when that format and that repetition gets upended. This is often the result of a handful of players who want more from their experience on the show than just a slow march to a predictable ending; the human element, not any kind of clever production trickery, is what makes Survivor different. That magic is why I and other Survivor sickos can name moments like the Black Widow Brigade's kill of Erik on Micronesia , or Parvati Shallow's double-idol play on Heroes vs. Villains , or Jesse Lopez blindsiding his closest ally on Season 43, or Operation Italy on Season 47. There are many others like this—few TV shows offer quite as rich a Remembering Some Guys experience—but what these moments have in common is that they amount to an escape from the mold that Survivor , due to the realities of reality TV but also because of choices made by its producers, has imposed on itself and its players.

This is what drives a lot of entertainment, of course. Moments of random chance or real transcendence during the monotony of a 162-game baseball season, for example, or a 24-episode season of television. Survivor isn't quite a sport and it's definitely not a scripted television show, but it has seemed increasingly confused about what its value proposition is in recent years, and felt especially at war with itself in its 50th season. Over the last 10 or so seasons, the show seems to have pit "good TV" and "good competition" against each other without ever quite settling on the balance that made Survivor good in the first place. Instead, it has become obsessed with the fabrication of Moments, instead of emphasizing the sort of openness and chaos that have created them organically throughout the show's long run.

What, then, will I remember from Season 50, the so-called biggest season ever, the one that was In The Hands Of The Fans? Is there a moment of pure thrill or joy to rival any that came in the 49 seasons before? I wouldn't say so. Instead, Season 50 played out as a slow-moving horror story in which the villain was the show itself and stalked its victims in a Jeff Probst mask. It's fitting that the most memorable morsel from Wednesday night's finale, in which Aubry Bracco completed one of the worst winning games in Survivor history and won $2 million plus a car for some reason, wasn't a bit of gameplay that happened in Fiji. It wasn't even a funny or entertaining answer from one of the players at the live show. No, it was Jeff Probst, veteran of TV and of Survivor specifically, spoiling the results of his own show to the confusion and chagrin of everyone involved: