Survivor: Season 48: The Off-Balance Review.
Outwit, Outplay, Outlast.
The finale of Survivor’s 48th season aired on May 21st. This review will discuss the season in detail, including the winner.
Please consider this your spoiler warning.
Otherwise, if you’re looking for the Off-Balance review of Survivor S47, you can find it here.
As always, thanks for reading!
Ryan.
There is something to be said for sheer staying power.
Even after a quarter-century on the air, even after the genre it helped pioneer has become throughly overrun and oversaturated to all hell, even after the show itself has made, over the past couple years, significant changes to its moment-to-moment framework - at its best, few things in the reality space can genuinely compete, level-to-level, with Survivor.
But as the show’s forty-eighth season crowned its winner this past Wednesday, though it wasn’t without the some measure of the inherent spectacle that powers TV’s longest running social experiment, collectively, this particular outing in Fiji never got off the ground.
Weak stakes, baffling strategic gameplay and the constant overhang of production, ostensibly keeping up the Lord of the Flies façade but practically, being far too eager to interfere.
And as the show, already, begins turning its eyes towards its landmark fiftieth season-to-be (with the castaways set be revealed on May 28th), it leaves 48 feeling even more undercooked.
Jeffery’s burners, left to simmer, just too low.
Now, that isn’t to say that the season didn’t land absent any punch, not entirely.
Of the final three, Kyle, who won his second immunity of the season on Day 25, was, as he made sure to highlight at final tribal, the only true gamer left standing.
Revealing to the jury, at last, the extent of what was the Kyle-Kamilla partnership (with Kamilla, to her great credit, hyping him up on the bench - the fact that he sent her to her untimely doom in the fire making challenge be dammed), as he expertly undercut what Joe and Eva, next to him, believed to be their strategic bulwark.
That being the one who saw that Shauhin was sent to the jury on Day 23 (with the false idol narrative) but beyond that, someone who made sure, far more than they did, to actively pull on the social-strategic threads that bind Survivor together: this, in what became a million-dollar winning, 5-2-1 jury vote in his favour.
Though while Kyle’s victory does ultimately elevate, kinda-sorta, what was a throughly underwhelming season on the beaches, it doesn’t wholly save it, either.
Kyle and Kamilla, by their own admission, worked a more subtle game, in contrast to Joe and Eva who positioned themselves as the season’s one-two coming out of the merge - not to their benefit, in the end, it became clear but while Kyle and Kamilla deserve their share of strategic recognition for threading the needle in incognito mode post-merge for as long as they did, the catch with any good Survivor power couple is to see them face visible pushback from whatever constitutes the present-moment minority.
That thin line, between appreciating strong gameplay for what it is and still being held by engaging week-to-week television (more so, as the show continues to commit to 90-minute episodes).
But even as the numbers dwindled, it became clear that this particular group of castaways, at large, they were terrified of making any legitimate waves, regardless of what someone like Shauhin, continually drafting himself as some sort of quasi-mastermind might claim (despite his game proving otherwise).
Waiting too late, misreading the room, sticking with the majority because it was the safest, easiest play, again-and-again, something crystallized a final time in this week’s closing episode: Mitch, realizing he was going home, only to lament, more than once, that yeah, he probably should have made a move, any move, days earlier, if only to better his (admittedly less-than-stellar) odds.
Even as Jeff pressed him, he didn’t once attempt to vainly plead his case. Content to see his torch snuffed out, almost in some apparent act of emotional self-sacrifice.
This, the running theme of 48.
Seemingly a forced-sober work retreat where people were more concerned with not hurting anyone else’s feelings, rather than driving themselves with the competitive gumption, socially and strategically, that would be best suited for those contesting a million dollar prize.
There was no fire, no real energy, no season-defining wildcard (à la 47’s Rome) and anyone that could potentially fit that bill, be it Sai or Star, either didn’t make the jury in the former case or was noticeably under-edited in the latter.
And in hindsight, it is obvious production, to their deterrent, was banking the Joe-Eva tandem to carry them deep into the season, even if, knowingly on their end, neither walked away as the Sole Survivor.
Sure, even if Eva, physically strong and socially trusting as she was, broke down a barrier as the first openly autistic person to compete on the show, her partnership with Joe, himself a four-time individual immunity winner, saw them so throughly insulated, they never needed, not once, to really compete strategically.
Yes, Eva’s reveal to her fellow castaways regarding her being neurodivergent and Joe’s “right there” response may have brought Jeff to tears and saw the show break through once more (if briefly) onto the larger cultural stage it once occupied but it also seemed, as a result, to shield them completely from any sort of legitimate gameplay ramifications, that is, until the final two hours.
Nobody wanted to push, to prod, to actually try to break up a visible duo if only because, dammit, at the very least you’re playing Survivor and that’s kind of the whole idea.
So instead, their big pitch at final tribal was that Eva, so safe as she was with her always-present degree of emotional immaturity in hand, had accumulated so many advantages she never needed them, while Joe, still spouting off his tried-and-true Fast & Furious platitudes finally learned, with Kyle and Kamilla’s reveal, that he didn’t have a single thing to hang his buff on.
Empty promises of loyalty and blatant disregard for jury management, for both, that repeatedly undermined their social games with an almost impressive degree of ignorance (as in, they all love us, there’s no contest).
This, a throughline that dominated most of 48 but had the opposite effect of its intention, via those on the ground, as the majority of jury votes proved
Despite taking up most of the season’s oxygen, they just weren’t a duo worth rooting for.
This front-and-centre approach however, it does speak more broadly to the reality of “New Era” Survivor, on multiple fronts, now very much a hard sprint and not a well-paced marathon.
Far more compact, more structured, from repeating challenges to every-other-day food rewards, inherently defeating the purpose of well, you know, surviving out there in the first place.
And while one may wax then, nostalgic for the days of old, it is understood, to a point, why the show has leaned more-and-more into the safe and sterile angle: be it the that-would-never-pass-today rawness of the earliest seasons or making sure to never repeat something like what occurred in Kaôh Rōng, in putting contestants in actual life-threatening danger.
But without a strong and effective cast to rise above that now well-trodden formula, the flaws, striking at their worst, become all the more apparent.
48 is not, perhaps, the worst season of Survivor in totality but it is undeniably a weak one - hardly able to support its starting weight, forget whatever it finished as.
48 seasons is just mind boggling!
Do you do a Survivor pool each season? I've never gotten into the show but found your review to be an interesting window- the shifting power dynamics, survivalist aesthetic, and game theory makes for a heckuva combo. I prefer some bare bones reality TV (Bravo, HGTV, & others) but could definitely see how when this show hits- it hits hard!
What are you watching this summer?