I'll say it: There hasn't been a lot of action in the post-merge of Survivor 48. Sure, strong people have won a bunch of challenges and run the game. But they've also faced limited opposition, largely because a lot of the more energetic, chaotic players didn't make it to the jury phase. (Mostly Thomas and Sai, but who really knows what we lost in some of the people who had more limited screen time?) Also because there were a lot of strong people left at the merge, and they banded together.

I don't want to pick on Survivor 48, I really don't. I'd much rather discuss emergent strategies, big moves, and innovative gameplay, or even exciting new challenge ideas or interesting twists. The problem is, except for Kyle and Kamilla blindsiding Thomas right after the swap, there haven't really been any exciting strategic moments. The Vula mess in the pre-merge was less strategy and more random people leaving or fluke events (Mary's being saved by her Shot in the Dark). David's departure in Episode 9 was a welcome departure from the season-long theme of buff people being physically dominant, but it didn't really seem to shake the foundations of the Strong Six all that much. They shed themselves of Mary in the process, but scooped up Mitch. No sweat.

As for challenges and twists, the first rule of the "New" Era is that the challenges have to be the same ones we've seen repeatedly before, just with slight modifications, like switching out a puzzle for a sandbag toss at the end. And the twists? Since the merge, we have had a shot-for-shot remake of the Chris Noble journey from Ghost Island in Ep.9 (which gave Eva her Safety Without Power), and for reasons unknown ... that's it. There have been no idols hidden since the merge. (If there had, someone surely would have found one by now, no?) So to all the "traditionalist" fans screeching for a season with no idols: Congrats! You got what you wanted! Pretty dull, huh? Not much vote-splitting, no power shifts, just a majority picking off the people on the bottom, while occasionally pruning back their own numbers when it's safe to do so (David). Welcome back, Survivor 2: The Australian Outback gameplay!

To their credit, the editors seem to be reasonably aware of this, and have been working overtime to liven things up in other ways, like Shauhin's impromptu tribal voices soundtrack during a challenge, the group "Fried Chicken and Waffles" chant, and Star's "My Enemies Are Plottin'" rap. But there are only so many distractions you can make before the audience returns to noticing that the overall vibe of the season is, well, a bit of a downer.

Maybe it's not really anybody's fault. Maybe it's just that real life is pretty bleak and intolerable right now, and in 2025, maybe it's just too uncomfortably reminiscent of the real world for the audience to enjoy watching a story about a group of powerful people who have had lives of relative comfort from the beginning of the season blandly flaunting their power, and gloating about how they can just "pick off" and send away a more colorful band of misfits who have no power. I guess we already have Andor for watching the oppressed fight back against overwhelming power. It's just that this season seems to be celebrating the wrong side of that equation.

But who knows? There are still three episodes of Survivor 48 left. We're at final seven. If things are going to turn around, this is the best spot for that to happen, traditionally. If this season is structured like the Hero's Journey, we're about at the point where All Hope is Lost, which comes right before the hero finally succeeding against all odds in the climax. Or it could be that this is a reality show and not a epic quest narrative, and it's just a bunch of stuff that happened, and all hope really is lost. Oh well, one or the other!

The obvious lies of Jeffrey Lee Probst

So why have I almost given up hope on this season? Well, let me tell you: Right before Survivor 48 started airing (but after it filmed), Mike Bloom interviewed Jeff Probst about various aspects of the season. Even at that early juncture, one question/answer combo really stood out as obvious obfuscation:

Mike Bloom: "Something I picked up on while talking with this cast is that Survivor 48 might be the physically strongest cast in the 'new era' ... it's something that even some of the cast members were picking up in the preseason. Was there an intention in assembling this particular cast?"

Jeff Probst: "Total coincidence. Honestly, until you said that, it didn't even occur to me, and now I see it very clearly."

(Side note to future Survivor players: The most obvious tell that someone is lying to you is when they start a sentence with "honestly." David did it when he told Kamilla he only put her name out in case Chrissy played her Shot in the Dark. Shauhin also did the same thing in a secret scene with Star, where she asked him who were his ideal Final Three, and he stumbled mightily with, "To be honest, I haven't thought that far ahead.")

Probst then spins off in a different direction, talking about how the only thing in casting he cares about is people's stories and their ability to tell them. (Not an unreasonable claim.) Then he sort of tries to return to the question, and again pivots away from it:

Jeff Probst: "So, to your point, I didn't even notice this was a physical cast. Would not impact the challenges at all because the challenges were built way before. I mean, as you know, we don't even have a cast for 49. But we have people on the ground building already." (He then detours once more to talk about the casting process again, and ends with, "I think our casting team is, capital letters, Extraordinary.")

If you've watched even a few seasons of Survivor, you've certainly noticed Jeff Probst swooning over alpha-male/challenge beasts like Colby Donaldson, Terry Deitz, Andrew Savage, and Brad Culpepper. It's his most consistent attribute as a host. So right from the jump, even knowing nothing about the season beyond the cast photos, this rang alarm bells as obvious deflection. There's no way Probst did not notice during casting that this was a strong group. So his repeated attempts at misdirections to the contrary rang incredibly false. The important question is: why would he do that?

Well, keep in mind that his role in this pre-season interview is to hype up audience interest in the season, but he also desperately wants to not give anything away. But as we now know (and was obvious at the merge, if not earlier), the only big alliance of note for the season has been the one based on physical strength. The Strong Six (now Four?) alliance of Joe, Eva, Kyle, David, and others has dominated the post-merge, and seems poised to run the table for the rest of the season. Unless Kyle and Kamilla (and/or Shauhin) create a small miracle, there's very little mystery left as to who the winner probably is (Joe).

If that miracle does happen, and we get a strategic mastermind pulling off a satisfying underdog win, would a Jeff Probst who has seen that all play out and now must pitch the season to the audience seem as spooked about talking about the physicality of the cast, dodging that topic not once but twice in a single answer? That seems unlikely. In contrast, if the winner is a big strong guy who is exactly the kind of player Probst roots for every single time, who aligns with other strong players, and the season's only real story revolves around that, would he run away with his hands over his ears, screaming "La la la, I can't hear you!" when asked about the relative buffness of the players? You betcha.

And that's why I just can't get excited about this season. Kyle and Kamilla also have a great story, are playing amazing strategic games, but it seems obvious their partnership is probably going to be broken up before Joe and Eva's. I would be happy to be wrong about this! To be fair, I did just get my "nerds win" fix with the Brains absolutely shellacking the Brawn (again) on SurvivorAU: Brains v Brawn II, a season that featured one of the most entertaining, improbable champions of all time, so maybe I shouldn't be so greedy as to want another one here. But I can't stop wanting that, so if that's not in the cards here, I'll just complete the season, then move on to SurvivorAU: Australia V The World in a few months.

So to sum up: In dodging a softball question, Jeff Probst had the opposite effect on this audience member than he probably intended. I'm less excited about the season than I probably otherwise would be. Whoops.

(And can we admit to ourselves that part of the blame here may be that the "capital letters, Extraordinary" casting process loaded up the season with a critical mass of non-fans who don't really know the show/game, but were Division I college athletes, who naturally all made the merge because physical players are what the New Era pre-merge selects for?)

Note: After I wrote all this, David Bloomberg, Jessica Lewis, and Chapell made a solid case on "Why ___ Lost" for Kyle actually being the winner this season, a champion who would actually combine both Brains and Brawn, and while not quite as fun as Kamilla winning, Kyle would definitely be a satisfying winner. Would Probst still be deathly afraid of spoiling the ending by saying anything about the physicality of the cast if Kyle won? Mmm ... maybe? (Too bad Mike didn't ask him if the 45 strategy of lawyers pretending to be literally anything else will ever actually pay off.)

Gaming that out for a second: With David now on the jury, Kyle and Shauhin are currently in the 3rd/4th spots in the Joe/Eva alliance, which is not a bad spot. If they're good at fire, they're in the finals. If either of them had flipped in Episode 10 at F8, they would have been at #5 on the anti-strength alliance, which is a significant downgrade. Both Kyle and Shauhin (think they) are working with Kamilla, so their first best move is to all flip together at final six, where they're at least moving laterally. Final seven is probably too early, unless they're sure they're a strong three against both Joe/Eva and whichever straggler (Mitch or Mary) is still in the game after the F7 vote. Also, they're at risk of Eva's Safety Without Power removing a target at F7, but will not be at F6, since it expires in Episode 11. Which means the groundhog saw its shadow, and we're probably in for at least one more week of strategic winter. Sigh.

Is 90 minutes too much time? At least sometimes?

Having already praised the editors for doing as much as they could with limited resources, there's also a case to be made (again, as pointed out on "Why ___ Lost") that this season's editing has completely abandoned strategic storylines that end up not working, in favor of longer challenges and more streamlined storytelling. This is particularly glaring when you've just watched SurvivorAU: Brains v Brawn II, which routinely featured multiple shifts in the strategic narrative of each episode, as a group puts a plan in place, someone comes along and hijacks that plan with a subgroup of the original plan, then another person whips together a third opposing plan, all of which plays out chaotically at Tribal Council. Here in Episode 10, it was "Let's get Joe," then "Oh no, we can't." They still wrung about 15 minutes of "plotting" out of that.

But maybe that just isn't possible in Survivor 48, maybe there really weren't side plans and backup plans in every episode, but it does seems plausible that otherwise fun stuff was just edited out (Star's entire pre-merge, for example) because it ended up not being important to the overall story. It's difficult to believe that after stoking the fires of revolution, Kamilla just threw her hands in the air after Joe won immunity, and said, "Oh well, I guess it's Star or Mary, then. There are no other options on this tribe of eight people." Although that's the story we got. Was there a more long-term reason for just treading water on this vote, beyond Mitch not being on board to draw rocks? We weren't shown one.

It seems a bit heretical to bring this up, then, after banging the drum for longer episodes for so long, but as @tvinthewoods on Bluesky astutely suggested, could part of the dullness of this season be that 90-minute episodes leave too much room for filler content on episodes/seasons with limited strategy? Case in point: "A Bit Tipsy" is a fun immunity challenge once in a while, but it always ends up with someone ~eventually~ winning after multiple people drop their stacks. That can be compelling if it happens once, but when you get to four, five, six lead changes? Then it just feels tedious, and as an audience member, you're sitting there going, "Okay, cool ... can we just skip to the end, then?" And in a 90-minute episode? No. No, you can't. And so what was originally a sprightly, six-minute jaunt when it debuted in S27: Blood vs. Water is padded out to become a lumbering 12:44 behemoth in its current incarnation, with slow-motion flies gathering on its bloated carcass. Even with two challenges (!), this episode felt like it easily could have been a lot shorter.

Ninety minutes has for the most part been a good change. The one exception was Survivor 46, where production couldn't be sure they were going to get longer episodes, and thus had to shoot as if would be hour-longs, but it ended up being more (lots of drawn-out filler, like with Bhanu's slow-motion exit). As other international franchises like SurvivorAU and SurvivorSA inspired the original push for 90 minutes, it should be noted that their runtimes are actually flexible, and they've been able to switch to shorter episodes later in the game, when there's less action due to fewer people. Australian Survivor runs three episodes per week, and by the third week, the middle episode is almost always just an hour. US Survivor may someday transition over to being streaming-only, at which point that sort of flexibility will be completely feasible. (To his credit, Jeff Probst has made the same complaint publicly, when asking for longer run-times). But for now, it's not. So what's the solution?

Right now, Survivor runs back-to-back with The Amazing Race, and both have 90-minute episodes. As a fellow weekly elimination format show, it probably also struggles to fill a full 1.5-hr timeslot as the number of contestants dwindles. Maybe both shows should switch (or have the freedom to switch) to shorter episode lengths at around week 8 or 9? Fill in the remainder of the three-hour primetime with reruns of Ghosts or whatever Big Bang Theory spinoff the network is currently foisting on humanity. I don't care, I'm never going to watch what's on after Survivor, but someone might.