Survivor and Top Chef are crucial pieces of my television rotation. In a reality TV landscape in which “consistency” is rarely attained, they’re among the most reliable and prolific shows going.
Survivor and Top Chef have a combined 73 seasons and counting, but if I had my way, they’d produce four or five cycles per year, because weekly routine hinges on televised jaunts to Fiji and wherever Kristen Kish and company have taken the cheftestants. They’re my comfort. We all need comfort.
That makes it worrisome to report that this spring’s installments — Survivor: In the Hands of the Fans and Top Chef: Carolinas — suggest that both venerable formats are broken.
A good reality show is capable of being fixed. Look no further than The Amazing Race, another of my comfort viewing favorites, which has broken itself over (families?) and over (strangers matched on blind dates?!?) and over (exclusively former Big Brother contestants?!?), before bouncing back.
But man, Survivor and Top Chef have gone wrong this season, and you know who’s to blame? Me! And you! Us! The fans are at least partially to blame! Though perhaps not quite as much as the producers, who have over-relied on us to the detriment of the integrity of their shows.
It was only two weeks ago that Kish, whose success taking over hosting duties for the ostensibly irreplaceable Padma Lakshmi is a small miracle, began a preliminary challenge with the announcement, “Today we thought, ‘Why not give the people what they want?’”
My heart sank. I’m going to speak on behalf only of myself and say that what I want from Top Chef is talented chefs making food that I wish I could taste. Never have I thought that I deserved control over that process.
Instead, 11 episodes into a 14-episode season and with no explanation beyond populism, Top Chef turned the quickfire over to the fans. Given three choices of key ingredients, the fans selected the easiest and most familiar — “peaches.” So far, so good. Given three choices of cooking times, the fans selected the most generous time — “30 minutes.” You rule, fans! But then, given a list of three potential twists, the fans voted to have the contestants shift work stations halfway through, to make them finish and serve a dish somebody else conceived and started.
Maybe the hope was that it would prove how resilient the chefs were? Maybe it would just create entertaining chaos? Instead, with almost no time and no flexibility, the chefs essentially plated what they’d been given. Nobody made it better. Nobody made it worse. So the judges were offering critiques to one chef of something a different chef had made. Rhoda, so likable and charming and unassuming, looked embarrassed to be accepting praise for what was entirely Sherry’s dish, which made Sherry justifiably angry. To make matters worse, the show gave the $10,000 challenge prize to Rhoda.
How did the producers not recognize this was going to be a problem? How was there not a quick adjustment to allow the prize to be, at the very least, split between the two contributing chefs?
The season has been plagued by regular head-scratchers.
The location, starting in Charlotte and then moving to Greenville, has failed to provide a unique personality or locally distinctive tasks. Part of me wonders if, when the Top Chef producers decided to do this season in Carolinas, they completely forgot that season 14 had already been set in Charleston, using the most fertile aspects of regional culture then.
Then there were the casting quirks. Having a pair of twins (Jonathan and Brandon Dearden) and a husband-wife duo (Jennifer Lee Jackson and Justin Tootla) was gimmicky, but not inherently bad. Presumably, the producers dreamt of climactic episodes in which the twins or the husband and wife were head-to-head for elimination or victory, raising the stakes. Instead, all four proved to be only so-so reality TV chefs and the judges never had to make a single Sophie’s choice between any of them. Reasonable idea. Weak execution.
Worse than that, Jennifer exposed a major structural flaw. Early on, she aggravated an existing shoulder injury, causing her to miss multiple quickfires, with no consequences, something that had never happened before. The producers had to scramble and throw out a rule that if she missed one more quickfire, she’d have to be eliminated, offering her a choice to leave and come back in a future season. She refused, stuck around for a while and only dropped out when her issues worsened. She never should have been given the choice. Jennifer grimacing through a string of average performances made for bad television, stuck the show with an oral commitment to bring back a contestant who made it through half a season of mediocrity, required a previously eliminated player to be returned to the game in confusing fashion, AND screwed up an entire season of the show’s ancillary Last Chance Kitchen web series. It never should have happened.
Of the two shows I’m talking about here, Top Chef is the one I’m most convinced is fixable. Easily. As bad as the “Let’s have the fans vote on one challenge for no reason” episode was, the following installment, built around visiting Asheville and learning about the role restaurants and chefs have played in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, was excellent. If the producers find a way to add a competitive component to the quickfire challenges, instead of just cash awards, I think Top Chef will be just fine.
I have bigger concerns about Survivor.
Season 50 was presented as a gift to the fans. They brought back 24 favorite players and did a variety of fan polls on topics both big and small, ranging from the availability of idols and advantages to whether or not there would be a live finale. I’m a fan (and writer of hundreds of recaps and exit interviews), so I voted a few times. In nearly every case, my votes went counter to the fan majority. So clearly, the problem is me.
I like a tidy game of Survivor, determined based on a mixture of competitive strength, social aptitude and strategy emanating from the players themselves. Give me one or two hidden immunity idols per season, just to add some uncertainty, and I’m happy. Good Survivor players generate chaos themselves. I don’t need Mark Burnett and Jeff Probst to do it.
Instead, Survivor 50 was non-stop nonsense. There were idols everywhere and advantages practically falling out of trees. There were stupid celebrity tie-ins to the different advantages, and Zac Brown and Mr. Beast even made appearances within the show. That the winner ended up being somebody who essentially withstood the nonsense — she got a “Billie Eilish Boomerang Idol” and nearly was sent home because of it — was a tribute to her game in a season that could have been subtitled “Expect the Unexpected.”
Except that that’s already the mantra on CBS’ Big Brother.
Survivor should never be Big Brother.
The difference is right there in the title: Survivor refers to, well, the one who survives, the contestant. That’s who we identify with and what we root for. The same is true of Top Chef.
Big Brother refers to the voyeur. Otherwise it would be called Hamster. We are the voyeur and the show is about the constant observation and manipulation and not, truly, about the people being observed. A third option would be The Amazing Race, where the title refers to the game itself — not the players or the producers, but the journey upon which we’ve all embarked. By that standard, Survivor would be called Surviving and Big Brother would called be Banal Backyard Conversations Between Racists.
This season, Survivor was interchangeable with Big Brother. The producers actively worked to upset merit-based performance on the grounds that fans find merit-based performance boring. The contestants couldn’t get comfortable, the game couldn’t find momentum.
The level of chaos was so thorough that when Probst came out during the live finale and accidentally spoiled the crucial fire-making challenge that determined the final three, I wasn’t sure if he had screwed up or if the producers had pulled one last celebrity-sponsored shake-up. The Kevin Sorbo Make Fire Live on CBS Twist or something. It was not that. Probst just messed up.
Truly, I don’t know if Survivor can or wants to be fixed, because the things that are broken have become codified.
They’re never getting rid of the over-saturation of idols and advantages and twists. I’m not sure what “new era” Survivor players would even do if they found themselves in Fiji and spent days looking for hidden tchotchkes and found nothing. Would they even know what to do with themselves? The producers fear they would not.
And there’s nothing that can be done with or about Probst unless he decides he’s ready to move on to the next phase of his career. He has been a paragon of reality hosting excellence for 26 years. Survivor doesn’t exist without him.
But Probst has made a gradual transition from hosting the show to shaping the show in his idealized image to, this season, inserting himself into the show and making it all about him. It wasn’t just the challenge he literally participated in. His commentary during challenges has gone from nonexistent to essential to overbearing. His role at tribal council has gone from observer to Phil Donahue-style orchestration to, this season, frequently making arguments on behalf of players.
And Survivor is never leaving Fiji. The financial and production incentives are too great. It doesn’t matter that the settings and challenges all look the same now. It is what it is.
What it is, though, is too distracting to be comfort television anymore.
And I need my comfort television.
