‘Survivor’ 45 Is the Best Season of the New Era
The Tribe Has Spoken
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The tribe has spoken: Survivor Season 45 is the best season of the new era.
OK, it’s just me saying that, but I do wholeheartedly believe I’m right. Let me explain why.
The “new era” of Survivor refers to the shortened format the series introduced in Season 41. The final season before the new era was an all-winners season called Winners at War. Season 40 aired from February to May 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic onsetting in the middle of the season. Because of this, the winner was announced by Jeff Probst in a live teleconference.
For the 40 seasons prior, castaways played the game for 39 days. The pandemic forced the show to get creative in order to keep things running. The solution was to cut game play down to 26 days, with that remaining two weeks being used as quarantine time for each of the players of the season. The game also underwent other format tweaks to compensate for lost time.
Beware advantages were introduced, the Shot in the Dark advantage was created, the players no longer started with a basic supply of food and had to win it in challenges instead, and they would also be punished for losing challenges by having their flint confiscated. Additionally, new risk/reward scenarios were presented to players, the risk often being the loss of their vote at the next Tribal Council, and there have been some new advantages that have already been done away with after just a few uses, such as The Hourglass Advantage (officially the Change History Advantage) that allowed a player to undo the results of the immunity challenge earlier that day.
Survivor has been experimenting a lot since Season 41, adding and removing things as they see fit. The series has also been getting its bearings with how the shortened seasons are edited. Season 43, for example, edited so much of Mike Gabler’s key moves out of the episodes that you were hard-pressed to find a viewer who wasn’t shocked when he won. Survivor fans are savvy viewers. The well-trained Survivor eye can often tell who’s looking like a winner as the season goes on. But that didn’t happen with Gabler. Probst addressed the Gabler edit to TV Insider ahead of Season 44.
Mike Gabler celebrates his Survivor win (CBS)
“It’s a very fair criticism and one we took to heart,” he said of the fan reaction. “Our job is to make sure the audience has all the information they need to solve the final mystery ‘Who will the jury vote for to win the game?’ We clearly didn’t do that. I will say that even I was surprised at how the final tribal council played out.”
In Seasons 41, 42, and 43, the feeling was that Survivor was still figuring out what works with this new format. Like with Gabler’s storyline, the edit has been one of the biggest points of criticism. Episodes increasingly featured less time at the tribe’s camps between challenges. That’s where the best Survivor scenes always happen because it’s 100 percent human interaction. Watching the players form alliances, make enemies, and plan their Tribal Council votes through these conversations is the best part of watching the show. With the new era came an increased focus on the game changes themselves. Fans eventually grew tired of the many new advantages, as they often didn’t produce much intrigue. So you’re left watching some lackluster plot twists that many would have preferred to see replaced with footage of extended talks between players.
Essentially, the show started to focus less on the contestants themselves and more on the game’s new structure, and with the shorter seasons added to the mix, the show’s quality suffered. Survivor Season 44, however, was a game-changer because of the absolutely captivating cast and the new editing style.
Because the Survivor 44 cast — featuring kooky fan-favorite Carolyn Wiger, the endearing and animated winner, Yam Yam Arocho, and more — was so funny, Survivor realized it could match their energy. The editing team was clearly having a blast with this cast, including more footage of players talking to the producers in confessional interviews because the talks were just so entertaining. The Survivor 44 cast revitalized the new era, but it was with Survivor 45, which concluded on December 20, that the show’s new format was perfected.
Because of the Hollywood strikes earlier this year, CBS extended Survivor and The Amazing Race episodes to 90 minutes each week. This extended runtime made up for the time we lost with the 26-day game. Survivor took every lesson it learned since Season 41 and applied excellent changes for 45, and they clearly were hoping to mimic some of the casting magic of 44 with the collection of players recruited for its successor. I didn’t think I could love a new-era season more than I loved 44, but 45 changed my mind.
The Survivor Season 45 cast celebrates Dee’s victory (Chuck Snyder/CBS)
Season 45 is the best of the new era. Nearly everyone who played this season was an excellent strategist, and the social game-playing was so strong that performances in the physical challenges weren’t even taken into consideration when deciding who to vote out and who to vote for to win the $1 million. The people mattered more than the game, as it should be with this long-running series.
The changes to the game structure were fun and adrenaline-pumping (Jeff stabbing a hole in a bag of rice during a reward negotiation is one of my favorite TV moments of 2023), not cumbersome like The Hourglass. And the Shot in the Dark advantage, which fans have been wanting to be cut because it has never worked out, actually worked in a thrilling way when Kaleb Gebrewold saved himself from a unanimous vote against him. The Survivor auction returned for the first time since 2015, this time with only food and a chance to brush your teeth available for bidding.
In a fix from Season 44, all-new puzzles were introduced so that players couldn’t practice them in advance, thus leveling the playing field. As an added bonus, we got a showmance for the second season in a row through Dee Valladares and Austin Li Coon. The fact that they made it to the Final Three but didn’t let their romance stop them from going at each other in the final jury pitches was just plain fun television. The cast and their strategic moves were great (well, not everyone’s — looking at you, Jake O’Kane), but it was also the sublimely entertaining edit that made this a top-notch season.
The “Playing With the Boys” sequence, Katurah Topps‘ time-lapse montage full of Bruce Perreault complaints, and the quick cuts between contradictory conversations made me burst out laughing. The editors also kept some scheming, such as the planning of Kellie Nalbandian‘s blindside, hidden from viewers. While I would have enjoyed seeing the plot thickening, I was delighted to be blindsided myself by her elimination. And to top it all off, the winner really did outwit, outplay, and outlast everybody else. Unfortunately, it’s not always the case that the best player of the season wins it all in the end. But fans saw Dee dominate the game with no mistakes all season long. She delivered the strongest season-long strategic, social, and physical performances, made the best pitch to the jury, and rightfully won.
Lastly, here are some numbers to back up my claim: I’ve been recapping Survivor since Season 42 (I’ve been watching the show since it first debuted when I was a kid). In that and the seasons that followed, the highest rating I gave was 4.5. I’ve never given a five-star review to an episode until Season 45. And in Season 45, I gave three.
Do you think there’s a better season in the new era of Survivor? Use the comments section below to try and change my mind!
Survivor, Season 46 Premiere, Wednesday, February 28, 8/7c, CBS
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