Review: Survivor, "Epic Party" | Season 50, Episode 1

Welcome to our coverage of Survivor's historic 50th season. As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent coverage will be exclusively for paid subscribers. For our fourth anniversary, you can get access to all our coverage (for this season and next) for only $44 for the year.

When it debuted, Survivor was a cultural force. It transformed the television landscape, helping pave the way for reality to dominate across broadcast, cable, and eventually streaming television. It didn’t invent reality television, but it made it appointment television, as evidenced by the summer of 2000 when we had to avoid newspapers on a cross-country road trip so we didn’t spoil the episodes that were recording on the VCR back home.

There’s certainly been some focus on this as Survivor debuts its historic 50th season, but I was struck during the lengthy opening montage how insular the show has become over time. Probst claims over and over again that this season is being “entirely” controlled by the fans, a blatant lie even before we get to whatever Mr. Beast and Jimmy Fallon nonsense to come, but there’s no question that the fans are driving the version of Survivor’s history on display. It’s full of moments that fans turned into memes, resonating not within culture at large but within the dedicated audience who has stuck with the show even as ratings have diminished over time. We can talk about Survivor’s impact on culture, but over time it’s been more of a question of the impact that audience has on Survivor.

Except that, as I note, this isn’t entirely true. Even in a season allegedly “controlled” by the fans, the version of Survivor being canonized in the leadup to Season 50 is whatever Jeff Probst wants it to be. Fans had no control over who got to represent the first 49 seasons, and no amount of binary choices (with some frankly misleading language) could create any influence comparable to that of the show’s producer. I don’t doubt that Probst cares about Survivor’s fans on a basic level; I just also believe he’ll choose to focus on certain fans over others when push comes to shove.

As a result, I go into Season 50 viewing this not as a celebration of the show I’ve watched for 50 seasons, but instead as a tug of war between Jeff Probst’s engineering of the show’s legacy and the players’ own battles to position themselves within it. Everyone involved knows this is Season 50. Every player has come into the game with an idea of how they want to contribute to this moment, and producers are no doubt encouraging them to lean into this. And so the question is whether the game has the space for each of them to articulate their own place within the show’s history, or if Probst’s own narratives will keep them from claiming a piece of the game for themselves.

Those are macro-narratives, though, and with tribes of eight returning players the micro-narratives of “Epic Party” are all about players who know each other directly or by reputation latching onto each other for safety. You see this happen primarily at Vatu, where Colby and Stephenie waste no time: they’ve played together before, and although they haven’t seen each other for 16 years there’s no way that two tribemates from “Heroes vs. Villains” weren’t going to pair up as a security measure at this point. It’s also no surprise that honorable Colby latches onto Kyle, man-to-man. But when they need to get to five, the logic starts to break down a bit. They’re getting good vibes from Genevieve, but why? Is it just because players like Aubry—who is not getting good vibes from Genevieve—are considered more dangerous? Or because they saw her as the easiest target after she spent her whole season struggling to connect with her fellow players?

You might expect this to play out as Old Era vs. New Era, but I think the better way to think about the season based on the casting and the organization of the tribes is players imagining themselves within that binary. Jenna shows up on the beach with a chip on her shoulder, desperate to prove that her lengthy hiatus from the game doesn’t mean she can’t hang with big players. And while she’s kind of trapped in the middle of the show’s run, I was struck by how Chrissy—who I would argue is the least recognizable player in this cast—similarly seemed to come in with very strong opinions on what needs to happen. Their respective targets each make sense: winners are often easy early boots in an all-stars season, so Chrissy targeting Dee tracks, and Jenna is not wrong about Cirie’s story being a liability. But they’re both way ahead of themselves, likely because they’ve had so much time to think about what they need to do to prove themselves and “earn” their place among what is imagined to be a historically representative cast.

This is why all-star seasons are compelling, and also why Winners at War didn’t really have the same vibe. There, everyone was coming in with the same story, effectively—they knew exactly why they were there, and didn’t feel like they had to prove anything to anyone. And there are certainly players for whom this is true here: Stephenie and Colby don’t seem insecure about their place on this cast, and the same feels true about Rick and Christian amidst their immediate bromance. But Season 50 is enough of an occasion that even someone like Ozzy, the ultimate alpha, is coming into the game to play it differently. Do I buy that he can really become “Oscar” and play a strategic game? No, but he wants to, and this reflects the identity crisis being a part of something like this can create.

And say whatever I will about whatever bullshit Jeff Probst injects into this game as we move forward, “Epic Party” mostly lets things play out among the players heading into the first tribal council. The tribes may not get their rice or supplies, and Ozzy might end up with an extra vote from the journey where they fought to earn the latter, but everything that follows that is a fairly pure social experiment based on the show’s legacy. When Cila loses the immunity challenge, it’s the perfect result for the story the show’s basic approach to Season 50 is telling. It’s Jenna as the representative of the very beginning, facing off with two Survivor legends in Cirie and Ozzy fighting for their own legacies while a bunch of new era players try to determine who works best for their game. Some of it boils down to very basic narratives we’ve seen in past seasons—strength in challenges vs. personal relationships—but there’s another layer here that only comes from all-star seasons and is exaggerated in the all-star season.

As such, Jenna is a fitting first boot. It’s not just the poetry of “first in, first out.” It’s the idea that here is someone who showed up trying to fight against their expectations, went too hard, and learned a larger lesson. Do I think the tribe was somewhat silly to leave Cirie in play knowing what she can do, given how I saw her and Parvati work their way through their recent Australian Survivor appearance? Yes. Would it have been far more interesting to see them target Ozzy? Also yes. But I understand why the New Era players—along with Rick and Christian—ended up feeling like anyone who comes to the beach intent on voting someone out might not be the best ally moving forward, and it’s not like they can’t pick off Cirie (and Ozzy) if they were to keep losing.

I’m sad, though, that the episode can’t just leave things there. Jenna doesn’t even get the ceremony of an episode’s climax, the three-hour timeslot taking us into Day 4. And look, I’ve seen enough episodes of Survivor to know that this episode would not be ending without some type of elimination, and so my mind immediately jumped to Kyle’s injury when I realized where I was in my recording. It’s the worst case scenario for Kyle, and for all the players who would be devastated to be in his position, and I’m disappointed in it myself: I liked Kyle fine. But I understand the impulse of the producers to let this be the final statement of this premiere, a powerful reminder of how much this means to the players, and how those stakes will shape every action and reaction that follows.

It’s a pity, then, that it has to share space in the final hour with the inevitable arrival of the bullshit. Of course fans voted for idols, and of course they voted for dynamic advantages, and of course Genevieve finds the Billie Eilish Boomerang idol, and of course Stephenie feigns excitement about it in a confessional even though she no doubt would tell her to “stick to singing” if she understood Eilish's politics. I’m numb to a lot of this on the whole, and beyond the unnecessary celebrity of it all none of it is particularly gamebreaking. Being forced to give the idol to someone you think might go home with it in their pocket is a cromulent-enough twist, and having Savannah’s block-a-vote be a secret even from the person she was playing against at the journey has some dimension to it. But after an episode that just let the players’ understanding of themselves and the game be the sole source of tension and conflict, it’s deflating to end on the downer of a player exit and a reminder that the Survivor fandom you’re most likely to relate to if you’re reading this is very different from the broad audience who voted to give Probst everything he wanted.

But I suppose this epilogue ensures the episode embodies the struggle I identified above. At the end of the day, is the soul of Survivor more powerful than the mad scientist who wants to keep tinkering with it? I can already tell I am going to spend the season yelling at the screen every time Jeff claims that the fans are in control, but I do think that this group of players has the power to shape the game in their own image. That might have been taken away from Kyle, and Jenna might have jumped the gun, but I’m choosing to believe that the ingredients are here for Probstian power to be overcome by the combined forces of old and new fighting for their place in a contested history.

Stray observations

• My thanks to Ben Rosenstock for handling Season 49 while I was indisposed this fall - I had my say in the comments, but it was a bit of a slog of a season, and that was without having the spoiler of Rizo and Savannah’s casting here. Ultimately, I do wonder whether both were necessary, but I do think having at least someone that the other players had no read on is important, and you can’t argue with the amount of story they get out of them here: just look at the complete arc from “Colby wants Rizo to die in a fire” to “Colby wants to mentor Rizo as a father figure.”
• One reason to cast two: it forced Savannah to reveal that she won herself, because she could never trust Rizo to hide the secret. I’m actually curious how much they allowed the two of them to converse once the decision was made for them to return, and at what point the rest of the castaways start to wonder if they might be allied in some way.
• I'll say this: I'm kind of shocked that they let the tribes be chosen at random? And I have to think they're pretty happy with the results, which struck me as fairly balanced?
• Maybe this makes me a bad Survivor fan, but I had zero memory of the South Pacific conflict between Coach and Ozzy, and am not in love with the way this has become a central narrative of the season. I just don’t care, and it plays into both players’ worst tendencies. They can both go home as far as I’m concerned.
• My boyfriend hasn’t seen Mike White’s original Survivor season, and wondered whether The White Lotus would even make him a celebrity, but he was quickly convinced once we got a full scene of White Lotus talk and other references. That said, I appreciate how quickly Mike was able to settle into a very similar vibe to his first go-round: he’s there to have fun, and to tap into the strength and perseverance he learned last time that he’s leaned on while making auteur television.
• By nature of needing to set up both Jenna and Kyle’s exit, the episode leaves the Kalo tribe under-edited. That’s not to say we don’t get some moments, but I’m still trying to get a handle on how quickly the old guard would be able to rally against Dee if she’s bonding with players like Tiffany or Kamilla (who said in her pre-game press she was pissed Kyle was also out there, so maybe she really went in on the voodoo doll’s achilles).
• Notable to me that both Angelina and Christian talk about having become parents, and the impact that it has on how they’re returning to the game. Less notable to me, despite Christian’s insistence otherwise, is the idea that this could somehow be a secret weapon. But hey, if Christian gets to the end and needs an emotional hook, maybe it works to his advantage.
• As outlined above, my rooting interest is for the players to beat the game, more than any one player managing to win out over others. That said, there’s a real plethora of masculine figures who I’d love to see taken down a peg, so just presume I’m rooting for any woman over any man and you’ve probably got the gist of it.
• Welcome to our coverage of Survivor 50. It comes as we’re celebrating the fourth anniversary of this newsletter, and if you’ve been around since then you know this is one of the first shows I was covering before this became the group project it’s become. Survivor was also one of the first subjects I turned to when I started blogging online 19 years ago, so it has a special place in my relationship to TV and to writing online. Whether you’re a long-time fan or want to dive in at a very weird time, I hope you’ll consider joining me in the weeks ahead as a paid subscriber.