Review: Survivor, "LIVIN" | Season 43, Episode 1
Another earnest cast walks into the Monster's den, but this time they know what they're getting into
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As the tribes for Survivor’s 43rd season stand on the beach in front of Jeff Probst, he starts questioning them on a familiar topic: Survivor.
This type of meta conversation has always been a part of the game, but it’s usually been about their relationship to the game as it stands in front of them. But as the show has leaned more into emotional appeals over the past few seasons, this conversation is increasingly about probing each player’s history with the game. They grew up watching it, and drew inspiration from seeing someone from their background win; their parents watched it when they first immigrated to America, inspiring them to believe in the American dream. More and more, Survivor is casting people for whom the game of Survivor is closer to a religion, giving these early moments an entirely different energy than they used to have.
You can tell this makes Jeff Probst happy. He’s overseeing a game filled with people who view him as a god, and whose reverence for the game means that they’re willing to go along with whatever twists he throws this way. And as much as I’ve lost the ability to find Jeff’s schtick anything but grating, I have to say that I too appreciate that the game is being played by people who seem to care about it. It makes you wonder how he stomached the seasons when casting was sending him nothing but random attractive people found in L.A. coffee shops and night clubs, and how no one involved with casting ever put together that diversifying their pool of contestants was more likely to find people genuinely invested in the notion that the game is a personal journey given how much their lives are defined by adversity (okay, that one’s less of a mystery, they were responsible for perpetuating a racist system).
It’s interesting, though, that this much more earnest casting approach to Survivor came alongside the show’s “Monster” era with Seasons 41 and 42 (the latter of which I covered here at Episodic Medium). In the past two seasons, the central narrative was that these people loved Survivor, and Survivor had turned on them: no rice, disappearing flint, and twists that players had no way to anticipate and prepare for. It’s hard to imagine people having nostalgic feelings about playing this game if that was the game they grew up with, and while the cast on Season 42 managed to keep those good vibes intact through the finale, Season 41 failed, and that risk remains as long as Probst sees turning the game against the players as a core storytelling strategy.
However, while there’s no question that elements of the Monster remain, there’s a key difference this time around: the players know there’s a Monster. Or, rather, they know there’s the possibility of one. No one is shocked to learn that they will lose their flint for going to tribal council. Everyone understands that when players are called off to go on an “adventure” it’s going to involve some type of risk/reward situation. And so what we have left is some of the Monster elements of the game, but without the feeling that players had no ability to plan for those possibilities. It’s closer to a level playing field, which makes it easier to accept the game overcomplicating itself for the sake of fulfilling Probst’s twist lust.
Thus far, the only major change we see is to the risk/reward trip, which is mostly just tweaking the existing setup. Rather than separate the players, it puts the decision to risk their vote in front of them as a group, creating an opportunity for them to bluff and try to influence others’ decisions. It also pushes the reveal of who earned reward earlier into the episode, moving it from their first trip to the voting booth at tribal council to their return to the beach. It converges with the fact that everyone returns to the beach and doesn’t even try to lie: the Monster is out of the bag, and so not only do Dwight and Gabler reveal their choice to risk their votes, they even share the results—Gabler gets a two-tribal immunity idol and Dwight lost his first vote—with their tribes. Neither change is mind-blowing, but they’re logical adjustments reflective of the fact players have more information, the kind of adjustments you appreciate as a viewer.
Otherwise, “Livin’” is just a Survivor premiere, and that’s kind of nice after the antagonism the Monster introduced into the previous two seasons. We get introduced to 18 strangers, there’s too many life stories to really grasp onto, and then eventually the immunity challenge narrows our focus to one tribe and the show starts in earnest. The added flow of the introduction—one tribe wins flint/supplies while the others choose between Sweat and Savvy options to retrieve them—ensures some additional insight into tribe dynamics, but it’s still about shelter-building, and stealing a moment to act as though you’re vibing with someone you just met so that you feel secure.
In some ways, though, that’s the limitation of the changes Survivor has been trying to make. They may be casting in a more diverse way, and those players may be more earnestly connected to the game than ever before, but the rules of the first elimination remain just as you’d expect. While we could play the hypothetical about what would have happened if Gabler didn’t have an immunity necklace, the truth is that when Baka faced the need to eliminate someone they still came down to the black woman who was perceived as the weakest, because it is ingrained in them that competing in challenges is the only way to succeed. Morriah did little wrong except exist, basically, and the thing about the “Monster” era of Survivor is that it in many ways enshrined this idea of “strength” being important to the game even more than in past seasons where it disproportionately led to women and especially women of color being eliminated first.
Morriah never really garnered a true storyline in the episode, hampered by the fact that Baka did the least strategizing of any of the tribes, with only Owen really trying to build alliances and ultimately nearly becoming the target simply because he did the worst job of building personal relationships beyond his vague “I’ll let you know if your name comes up” line. The only thing she says that resonates is in the intro, where she says that unlike others in reality TV history, she really was on Survivor to make friends. And so it’s not like she was actually playing a super great game, and went home because the players around her just couldn’t see it. But it reinforces that for all the ways Survivor tried to reinvent itself last year, and even after Maryanne won the entire game right before these tribes went to Fiji, these players still have a very limited imagination of what matters at these early stages of the game.
On initial judgment, this cast is not quite as winning as last year’s, and while I am never going to suggest being sad that we’re back to a less twisty version of Survivor, the absence of anything explicitly new does mean that there isn’t the same novelty that drove some surface-level excitement last time around. What we’re left with is a season that is going to need to generate story the old-fashioned way for the most part, and that means that this is very much a foundation on which the subsequent episodes will build. It’s a pity the result here felt so reductive of that past, but I’m hopeful that the good vibes of the first moments on the beach will carry this group through and keep the monster at bay.
Stray observations
Whereas many of the players are “Grew up on the Show” Survivor fans, Cody is a “Binge-Watched it and Decided I Would Win” Survivor fan, and I just do not have time for any of his bullshit. I’m hopeful that his hubris will come to bite him sooner than later, because his brand of villain isn’t fun to me.
Sami is the episode’s other big standout, mainly because he’s got the youth angle, the physical strength angle (“Super Sami”), and also the “I’m smart, but I don’t want people to know it” moment during the brain teaser challenge where he’s the first to suggest adding numbers. It’s all a fun smokescreen to disassociate him from that TikTok I saw a few weeks ago that asked BYU students if they’d rather watch porn or die.
“We won because we gave it our all”—honestly, my ongoing concerns about the subconscious social marginalization driving so many early tribal councils aside, Morriah probably deserved to go home for saying this so earnestly at tribal. As much as I hate the patterns, and feel like Survivor needs to do something to these early immunity challenges to make the physical game less of a dominant thought in players’ minds, the camera would have caught my eyes rolling into the back of my head if this had been said in my presence.
Gabler had some chaotic energy at earlier points, and was the first to spout the “we won because we tried” nonsense, but his sudden announcement he was going to use his shot-in-the-dark because he was involved in the loss was unhinged, and you could sense his tribe recoiling. Curious to see how long someone with that chaotic energy manages to survive.
Some of it came down to the events in the episode, and the fact two men were the ones who risked their vote, but the overall gender balance of the episode’s edit was out of whack, with male perspectives really centered in the edit. We got a really broad diversity of smaller character moments—exploring queer and racial dimensions of the cast, for instance—and a couple of women’s alliances, but the actual storytelling was really driven by Cody, Gabler, and Sami.
“Just like the Shih Tzu that I put in the incinerator” absolutely would have been the episode title if he’d cut out some of the extraneous language, right?
The title card thanking the Fijian government and the people of Fiji was interesting, and probably a concession made as part of their production arrangement? Curious if we see it every week, their equivalent of the Georgia peach on everything filmed in Atlanta.
Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Survivor! Back when I started this Substack last year, this one was of the first shows I was covering, and it’s weird to be back on the beat while there’s seven—seven—other shows being reviewed, with five new contributors as part of the team. If you’ve been here from the beginning, I’m excited to return to Fiji with y’all. As I noted back in May, though, I teach a graduate seminar during the evenings on Wednesday, so these will typically be later than usual. Thanks for being here, and here’s hoping for a strong season ahead.
My partner: "Why is Morriah considered the weakest in the tribe?? Just cuz she's heavier than the other women on the team? Look at Jeanine!!"
Me: "I think it has less to do with that but just because she's the only black person on the team and everyone's unconscious bias is showing."
The diversity casting is great, and her tribal council was awful, but damn they REALLY need to work on that shit. You'd think after 41 and 42 they would have learned something but if yikes.
Yes, small tribes and faster time frames have really reinforced voting out the "weaker" tribe members first. And the other women will always be faced with the same dilemma showed in this episode whereby keeping the tribe strong they risk setting a precedent that puts them on the chopping block for future votes.
Cody is annoying, but I also feel like the show has had a lack-of-villain problem in this newer, more earnest era of the show, so I suppose I appreciate his presence for now. In any case, I don't imagine him being long this game.
One last point: I do like that they cast genuine fans for the show (at 43 seasons, it would be silly not to at this point) but I also wish they downplayed the "meta" aspect of asking everyone what the show means to them I( could also do w/o Jeff constantly self-consciously talking about how hard things are to justify the 26 day format). At least its usually just in premiere episodes where they over emphasize these aspects. And we can be thankful Jeff is no longer talking to the camera directly!