As the controversial Survivor 41 approaches the midpoint of the season, the pros and cons of the new era are becoming clearer. In preseason press, host and executive producer Jeff Probst hyped the season as the beginning of a new era for the long-running reality competition show, and it has certainly lived up to that promise. Survivor 41 has introduced many format changes and twists to the classic game that separate it from its predecessors.
The influx of new advantages and twists include the Beware Advantage, the Knowledge is Power Advantage, the Shot in the Dark, and most recently, the complicated merge twist that sent Erika Casupanan to Exile Island. Many of these changes have been primarily met with resistance and criticism from fans and former players. The gameplay twists have been the main target of backlash from the Survivor fanbase.
Though the season certainly has its major drawbacks, there are some positives to consider. First, the Survivor casting team has assembled a stellar group of individuals to play the game in Survivor 41. Thanks in large part to CBS' diversity casting initiative, which dictates that all CBS reality shows must have at least fifty percent of each cast's contestants be BIPOC, the season has featured several standout players and alliances that have not often been represented on Survivor. For instance, the latest episode of Survivor 41 showed four Black players coming together to form an alliance in a similar fashion to Big Brother 23's Cookout alliance. It has been very rare for Survivor to bolster casts with enough diversity for such an alliance to occur, with notable exceptions being Survivor: Cook Islands and Survivor: Fiji. Players like Shan Smith and Naseer Muttalif have already cemented themselves as near-locks for future returns to the island thanks to their performances in the early game. The season has also featured interesting gameplay from the Ua tribe, the strategic highlight of the season so far being when Shan convinced JD Robinson to give her his extra vote before she brutally blindsided him.
On the cons side, however, it is very difficult to overlook the detrimental impact the abundance of twists has had on the season. Nearly every episode, save for episode four, "They Hate Me 'Cause They Ain't Me," has introduced a new twist of some sort. Most of these twists have been quite complex, involving some combination of extra votes, lost votes, steal-a-votes, idols, or advantages. Because of the intricacies involved in the twists and how their rules work in combination with the rules of the other twists, the episodes have had few chances to showcase the dynamics between the players themselves, creating a mostly detached edit in which major events seem to happen arbitrarily and are solely dependent on luck and happenstance with regard to twists.
It's difficult to ascertain which audience is meant to find the Survivor 41 twists appealing. Casual fans likely struggle with the overly complex curveballs, while many Survivor superfans have expressed resentment for how unfair and game-breaking the twists are. Similarly, new fans arriving to the show after finding it on Netflix may be struck by how different the show is now from the seasons that hooked them on it. Though Survivor 42 has already been filmed, hopefully, the show's creative team listens to the good-faith critiques of the show from the people who love it and adjust their approach to Survivor 43 and beyond with those suggestions in mind.
Survivor airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on CBS.