Survivor is always making subtle tweaks, but the most obvious recent change we’ve seen is the expansion to 90 minute episodes. Beset by the Hollywood strikes and in need of more content, CBS decided to supersize Season 45 by adding an extra 30 minutes each week, and while it seemed like a short-term change brought on by necessity at the time, it’s stuck around for Season 46, which debuted last week. Host Jeff Probst recently hit up his podcast to talk about his own feelings, and they line up pretty closely with mine.
The longtime figurehead of the most successful reality show in history said he’s a fan of the longer runtimes, not because he likes more time for the sake of more time, but because he likes giving certain moments the time to really breathe. To help explain himself, he brought up the idol hunting we saw during the Season 46 premiere. Castaway Tiffany found the Beware Advantage, and the show gave us four minutes of her going through all the steps to eventually retrieve her prize, which, according to Jeff, was two and a half minutes more than we would have gotten with a 60 minute episode. You can check out his full quote from his interview with Entertainment Weekly…
Instead of an idol hunt lasting for 90 seconds, you could let it play for four minutes. And in that extra time, you got to see inside the person, the panic, how they dealt with it, the dirt on their fingernails, and digging one more time, and here comes somebody — all of those are things that in a 60-minute episode we'd have to say, ‘We don't have time for it. It doesn't really matter.’ But then when you see it, you're like, ‘Well, it does matter!’ I think 90 minutes is a great sweet spot for an episode of Survivor.
At its worst, Survivor episodes can feel like a highlight reel. This happened. And then this happened. Then after that, this happened. It’s tough because, as a viewer, we need to know all the major moments that are going on so we can track the story and be in the loop about why people are voting certain ways, but at the same time, you can’t actually get to know people unless you have time to sit with them. Many of Survivor’s all-time great moments aren’t a huge deal on paper. Instead, they’re just castaways being themselves and bonding or having conflicts and working them out as human beings. Those are the moments where we really decide as viewers who we want to root for, but when a lot of stuff happens and the show is only 60 minutes, that's the stuff that ends up getting cut.
I have no idea who is going to win Survivor 46. I’m not even entirely sure which contestants I’m going to want to root for, but I do know thanks to the longer episodes, I’m going to spend way more time with everyone and have a way better grasp of what’s actually going on. That’s a huge positive, and just like Jeff Probst, I’m firmly convinced 90 minutes is the exact right length for a non-premiere, non-finale episode of Survivor.
You can watch new episodes of Survivor 46 on Wednesday evenings on CBS or through other streaming mediums.
