[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Survivor Season 47 Episode 5.]
A new bombshell has entered the sanctuary. Survivor introduced a brand new twist in Season 47 Episode 5: The Survivor Social. It’s a trip to the sanctuary for the winners of the reward challenge, and the first “social” allowed players from different tribes to connect at the barbecue — something that doesn’t typically happen pre-merge. Jeff Probst explains the purpose of “The Survivor Social” in the latest episode of the On Fire podcast (listen in full below).
Probst explained the new twist ahead of the challenge in Episode 5, saying that the three tribes would be divided into two just for that challenge and the winning combined team gets to celebrate together with a hot meal afterwards. They got to play cornhole as well. Probst explains to cohosts Jay Wolff and Charlie Davis in On Fire that this twist was implemented as an experiment to see how the players would take advantage of their version of an in-game “happy hour.”
“The idea is a temporary switch — key on temporary — for the reward challenge only. So really it is a chance to co-mingle with the opposition. And the question you’re posing is what will each player do with this opportunity? Because as Charlie can speak to, you can enhance or injure your game with every single decision you make,” Probst says, as Davis (runner-up for Season 46) replies with a laugh, “Oh, yes. Big time.”
“Survivor cornhole was always a part of the idea. We always tried to imagine it as Survivor‘s version of a happy hour with hot dogs and beer,” Probst goes on. “About the name: Survivor Social was the working title. That was just sort of the placeholder, and we started an email chain and it was like five or 10 of us and we’re like, throw out every name we can think of and we couldn’t find anything better.”
One idea was the let the players name the twist during filming. “I actually considered and suggested what if we let them name it and let them own it? It’s the first time we’ve done it, you tell us what we should call it,” Probst shares on the podcast. “And in this case, looking at the how and the why would be very clear you’d be giving agency to the players. They get to say, I was the first one to ever do the social hour and we got to name it. That’s cool.”
Episode runtime ended up taking priority over letting the players name the new feature. “Then you have to address the how, and the how means you got to show them naming it, and this could easily take a minute at a minimum of screen time,” the host goes on. “Even though as we’ve said we have 90 minutes, we still always struggle to get our episodes down to time. So in this case, we felt like the better decision would be to present it to the players fully baked with a name and a cool sign.”
Now that it’s aired, does Probst like the twist? Will there be more Survivor Social happy hours in future seasons? He explains in On Fire that they’ve made some notes about what to change, but they won’t be revealing those tweaks to fans. For now, the twist’s return seems up in the air.
“I think some things worked really well. There were a few things that we would change if we do it again, which I won’t bore you with right now,” Probst shares. “But to your point of the question is every single idea, everything we do goes through an evaluation at every stage. So we evaluate it and shoot holes in it during creative before we commit to shooting it. Then while we’re shooting it, the producer that is out there is making notes like, ah, we could adjust this next time. And then after we shoot it, we talk about it. And then in post, when the editors get it, they will often find something too and say, next time you shoot this, if you would give me this shot, then I could tell this story better. So based on all that feedback, what we always do is we modify and find the ways that we can improve it.”
Davis loved the twist, saying that it played into what already happens among the tribes pre-merge.
“Before the merge we’re like tabloid magazines,” he says. “We love other tribe gossip. It’s probably aside from food, the number two topic that we discussed besides strategy, asking about each other, but we’re always going through picking maybe a showmance that might happen or who might be on the outs, who’s running the show. We love to talk about other tribes even though there’s not much to go off of. But it is a little bit strategy as well.”
Get more behind-the-scenes details about the episode in the full On Fire episode below.
Survivor, Wednesdays, 8/7c, CBS