On Set for That Bloody, Teary ‘Survivor’ Merge: A Deep Dive Into What the Cameras Didn’t Catch

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On Set for That Bloody, Teary ‘Survivor’ Merge: A Deep Dive Into What the Cameras Didn’t Catch

[This story contains spoilers from Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans‘ new episode, “The Blood Moon.”]

It’s around midnight on Mana, the Fijian island where Survivor films and sets up its basecamp for a few months out of every year, and Jeff Probst has emerged from the darkness wearing flip flops. The perennial host has changed his footwear just after running the equivalent of a reality-TV marathon: Emceeing three tribal councils in a row for the first time in Survivor’s 50-season history, going for several hours without a break — or a script. Yet he appears more energized than ever. Emotional, too. He rattles off thoughts on the three contestants who were just voted off, having made the merge — that key midpoint in the iconic competition series where divided tribes come together to battle out the endgame — but not the jury, where they’d be able to vote for the winner.

“Kamilla was shocked,” Probst says. “Shocked.”

“It was hard to lose Genevieve.”

“How lucky that we got to Colby last. He’s going to go out a hero because he played this game cool. He’s going to feel good again.”

Colby Donaldson getting voted off.

This supersized merge episode saw a fan favorite from one of Survivor’s earliest seasons, airing a full 25 years ago, going home right after two of the show’s newest breakouts. The arc nicely represented what this all-stars season has been all about, throwing major figures from across the show’s history together in a fight for $1 million — and in most every case, redemption. This unfurled via the Survivor “Blood Moon,” a lunar-eclipse riff bringing about a twist proportional to the season’s epic stakes. Three players going home in one night certainly qualified.

After the contestants merged, Probst divided them into three random groups of five for a combined immunity and reward challenge, each of which would then attend tribal to vote one of their quintet out. Two other players, Ozzy Lusth and Rizo Velovic, were sent to Exile Island, bypassing the challenge but surviving past these eliminations — leaving the rest to anxiously consider what awaited them. (Below, you can watch an exclusive bonus scene capturing that moment.)

The last person standing in the endurance competition per group would receive individual immunity — the ultimate winners being New Era winner Dee Valladares, old-school runner-up Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick and newly minted Mike White slayer Christian Hubicki — while the longest lasting overall would also win the highly touted Applebee’s reward for their quintet. Stephanie snagged that crown.

***

The day before merge day, Probst is up and working around 5.30am, writing out his on-camera remarks that’ll explain the significance of the Blood Moon to the contestants. “I don’t have a script or cue cards or anything like that,” he tells me later that morning. “But now they’ll have some context and some story — it’s not just a triple elimination, it’s a Blood Moon. Then in future seasons, maybe people should go, ‘Please tell me it’s not a Blood Moon!’”

Our next stop on Blood Moon eve is tribal council, for some lighting tests — because yes, the Blood Moon is to be literalized onscreen. “The theme [of the season] is the Phoenix — rebirth through fire,” Probst says. “It’s the biggest tribal we’ve ever done: 7.500 square feet. The highest spire is like 60 feet.” The team is playing with flashes and tints, giddily encouraging one another to push the imagery further. “We’re gonna see if we can do, like, a wash of red — and okay, the players may notice, they may not,” Probst says. “But this is one of those moments where we want to take the idea and bring a cinematic feel to it and break the reality.

Jeff Probst.

“It isn’t a total lunar eclipse, but — oh, shit.” He stops as he sees the Blood-Moon visual plan put in action before him. “I love it.” The phoenix will glow with a blue tone, he’s told. “The idea is that it hasn’t consumed the entire world, right?” Probst says excitedly. “It’s just a glow.”

The next morning, in the boat on the way to the challenge, Probst closes his eyes and covers his ears, preparing for a mammoth day. We hit the sand, walk through some forest and into the elaborately designed playing field, before congregating behind the cameras. Probst rehearses his speech — the Applebee’s reveal, which is more exacting, and the Blood Moon bombshell, which is more playful — before, for several minutes, he stands totally still, pacing in the shade with the Applebee’s copy sheet in front of him.

Then, we’re ready. Probst calls “Come on in!” and the contestants walk in one by one. Probst glides through his dialogue for the day in a single take, without stopping or even stammering. He relishes the contestants’ shocked faces as they absorb the difficulty of simply surviving the day on the island. “It will cause the entire Survivor world to pause and take notice,” he says.

“We’ve got no idea what’s going on, Jeff,” player Rick Devens says. Benjamin “Coach” Wade announces off camera, “Broke my back on this challenge, Jeff!” referring to his first season from 2008 in which he ran the same endurance test, called the Chimney Sweep. “I remember!” Probst says.

The Chimney Sweep challenge as it begins.

The cameras cut as the players get into position. There’s the application of sunblock, a few chugs of water. The legendary Survivor five-timer Cirie Fields announces she needs to use the bathroom. “I don’t even care who sees,” she says as she rushes toward the bushes. And there’s some aimless chatter, including when Dee asks Probst an intriguing question: In his view, how is the season going so far — is it entertaining? Living up to the hype? Probst answers with a resounding “yes.”

“I wanted to see how he’s feeling about it, but it kind of pumps me up as a player to hear, ‘Oh, it’s going well,’” Dee will later tell me by Zoom, after filming concludes. “That gives us affirmation we’re doing something right — and they didn’t make a mistake in choosing us…. One thing about Jeff, he will not bullshit you. He’ll tell you the truth. If he thought the season was going badly, he’d be like, ‘You guys gotta step it up.’”

Fields will later add, of why they seek his opinion while the game is still going on, “Jeff is the ultimate judge… It’s like your parent putting you in Harvard: ‘You’re in Harvard now. Let’s see what you got.’”

The Chimney Sweep challenge as it ends.

Cameras cut after the challenge wraps. Probst asks medical to evaluate Colby Donaldson, who’d injured his foot in a previous challenge and bowed out of this one in a yelp of pain, and Chrissy Hofbeck, who appeared lightheaded after nearly outlasting her groupmate Stephanie. Both are cleared before the players head out.

A few hours later, while the contestants are making their last pleas for votes, Probst calls me into his dressing room. Welcoming me in, he muses a bit about Stephanie’s big win and how she’s impressing him so far. “We weren’t sure when we called Stephanie, initially, how it was going to go — even her first interview, we were a little lukewarm [about casting her] because she talked a lot about kids and sports and having to leave them,” Probst says. “We thought, ‘Man, we don’t want somebody that won’t be able to disconnect.’ But then we had a second call and it was fire in the belly.”

The winners of the Applebee’s reward, with immunity winner Stephenie on the right.

The Applebee’s Reward

Just down the road from the tribal council, this is where Probst changes clothes for the evening, gets mic’d up, and prepares for the evening — after all, he’ll be interrogating 15 people over more than four collective hours. When you walk into the hut, you see a big board featuring pictures of all of the remaining players, sorted by tribal group. Probst reveals that the players chose the order in which they’ll imminently attend tribal. “I’m trying to remember how they did it,” he says with a laugh.

The board also lists every advantage that every player has in the game: Cirie’s extra vote, Aubry Bracco’s immunity idol, and so on. “We started doing it when people started making a lot of fake idols, so that I would always be able to know that’s the only real thing in the game,” Probst says. “If Devens pulls a fake idol out of his pocket, I don’t have to worry that there’s intel I don’t have. I know it’s fake.” (Probst surely does know, though, that Devens has planted a fake idol in the tribal-council set, yet to be found.)

He’s mulling over the questions he will ask to spur the most dynamic conversations, since he doesn’t use an earpiece or script. “Every question I ask is designed to be used by the smart player to move the story where they want it to go,” he says. Who’s best at it? He points to Cirie’s picture on the wall. “Maybe the greatest player of all time — yeah, for real,” he says. “She’s still here. She shouldn’t be!”

Probst heads to tribal while I watch from a kind of makeshift video village nearby, along with much of the crew. It’s about 7pm and everyone is settling in for a long evening. The snack counter is lined with bags of potato chips, cookie jars, and an iced-coffee vat that used to be a water dispenser. (A labeled stick of tape indicates the shift.) When the first group strides in, Probst walks them through the process, since Chrissy and Tiffany Ervin have yet to cast a vote this season. ““I know what you sacrificed,” he says before the cameras start rolling. “It’s fucking hard out here…but if there aren’t stakes, who the fuck cares?”

Kamilla after she is voted out.

Kamilla Karthigesu is eliminated in a narrow 3-2 vote. Genevieve Mushaluk goes next in a unanimous decision. With the clock past 10pm, the final ceremony of the night will be the most emotional and dramatic — pitting Survivor giants Cirie, Coach and Colby against heavyweight newbies Dee and Emily Flippen. For this group, during the off-camera setup, Jeff gives a unique speech about having to look them “dead in the eyes,” no matter what happens, but that they must remember: It’s TV. He feels for them.

What ensues is a poignant meditation on what it means to leave a legacy behind on Survivor, as it becomes clear that Colby — arguably the show’s first-ever true celebrity, having played a quarter of a century ago — will be voted out. He and Cirie hold each other tightly through the teary discussion, which runs more than a half hour (yes, these get cut down). They speak of what the show has meant to them and what it’s given to them. Noticing Dee getting emotional, Jeff calls on her next to speak to how watching her Survivor gods bear their souls is impacting her. She meets the moment.

***

“I could just sense it,” Probst tells me the next morning of why he called on Dee before shifting to the vote procedure. “Just I was looking at her going, ‘I think something’s not right.’ That’s why I asked her that question.” In general, the atmosphere at all three tribals felt more authentic for him than usual. “Most of the time at tribal, I take everything with a grain of salt because I’m fully aware that a lot of times they’re lying,” he says. “Last night, I knew they weren’t lying. You could just tell.”

We’re at Jeff’s Fiji house, on the other side of the island. He has an entire season to finish at a breakneck pace, but he’s taking breaths a little more slowly on his oceanfront dock. “That’s the longest day I’ve ever had of production in my whole life of anything I’ve done,” he says. “I was up at 5:00 a.m. working on Blood Moon, and then Applebee’s — and then three tribal councils!” He knows I’ll be writing about all that, and is glad I can report firsthand that production didn’t engineer the episode so Colby went home last, in a devastating sendoff befitting the Blood Moon — in fact, production had nothing to do with it. “The crazy thing was the last tribal, such an emotional end of the episode, was completely up to them,” he says.

Genevieve after she is voted out.

Colby is top of mind as we reflect on these last few days. “He’s unique to me because we were friends for years — back when Survivor first started, there were only a few people who’d played, and they were my friends as much as they were players on the show because we spent all this time together,” Probst says. “But Colby’s had a very emotional ride. The last time he played, he wasn’t happy — he wasn’t happy to be here and didn’t want to be here. I didn’t know if he’d ever play again.

“And so I was really excited when he said yes [to season 50],” Probst continues, before revealing he made contact after what was likely Colby’s last day ever on Survivor. “I just sent him, through our doctor, a text and basically said, ‘Hey man, I’m really glad you came back. I know your story was one of redemption. I think you got it. I think you’re going to be really happy with how it’s received.’”

Probst is still stuck on the poetry, though, of that moment ending the longest Survivor day of Probst’s life. “If it was the second tribal, then you’d have to restart the engines and do a third one,” he says. “Instead, you end with the cowboy, broken and hobbled, walking off. And you tilt up to the Blood Moon — and you’re done.”

**
Survivor airs new episodes on Wednesdays at 8pm on CBS and Paramount+.

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0 1 10 minutes read