[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Survivor Season 47 Episode 10.]
Jeff Probst knows he represents “authority” in Survivor. That comes with being the host and showrunner of the long-running series. In his 47 seasons as host, he’s learned how to roll with the punches when contestants express disappointment, anger, the works after the seasons air, often because they don’t feel their scenes that made it into the final edit provide a fair picture of how they played the game. Still, Probst admits he’s had his “feelings hurt” when he sees players “talking trash” about him during and after the seasons air. He opened up about this in the November 20 episode of the On Fire podcast, the official Survivor aftershow.
This topic came up when Probst and cohosts Charlie Davis and Jay Wolff discussed Teeny and Genevieve’s long, hard talk on the beach in Season 47 Episode 10 right after Sol’s blindside in the previous episode’s tribal council. They weren’t talking about Probst in this tense conversation, but it did spur tearful solo confessional interviews with both of the players as they struggled with how the social aspect of the game was personally impacting them. As Davis said in On Fire, “it is so, so much more difficult to play the game than you could ever imagine” because “those types of deep, intense, concentrated human interactions will change you. They will change how you see yourself, how you see the world.”
Probst shared how seeing player reactions to the show’s edits and their interviews afterwards have changed him.
“I often feel like there’s a power dynamic at play on Survivor involving me, and things can get a little confusing for the players because I represent the authority of the game,” Probst said. “I know that at times players can get frustrated with me during the game or when a season is over if they’re not happy with how they did, or they’re not happy with the number of interviews they got, or we didn’t show all their funny moments, all of which can be true. I know that I’m often the person they want to blame and I understand that. And I’ve heard a lot of former players talking a lot of trash about me after they play. Like Teeny and Genevieve, I get my feelings hurt as well.”He trusts that in time, former contestants will eventually realize that he wasn’t all that bad.“Over the years I’ve started taking comfort at night by believing, or choosing to believe, that in years to come, players will see me not as an adversary, but just as somebody who was doing their best to create an adventure for them and I was merely playing my part,” Probst shared. “That’s what I hope.”RelatedHow to Watch 4-Hour ‘Survivor’ 47 Finale Live on TV & StreamingDespite what some players may think, Probst stated that the Survivor creators spend a lot of time meticulously assuring that the game is fair. The Season 47 Episode 10 challenge, for example, required the players to have their hands and feet tied as they inched their way across a sand dune while pushing a ball. The sand dunes were identical in size. That didn’t just happen by chance; the show’s creators worked hard to create a level playing field.“This dedication of fairness goes back to Season 1,” Probst said. “If you came to location and you watched a challenge being built, I’m pretty sure you would be shocked to see how much time is spent on little things like measuring the distance from the starting mats to the first obstacle. We do it down to the inch, the tightness of the knots checked by three different people to make sure they’re accurate and equal.”He knows that this is something the audience may never realize, and that’s okay.“We take that part of this show as seriously as we take anything. For this particular challenge, when it comes to the sand mounds, the art department runs these string lines and they do three of them per lane along the length of the course from start to finish. So they’ll have one on the outer edge of the left, one on the outer edge of the right, and then one straight down the center,” Probst explained. “So when the mounds are formed, each mound will be touching one of those string lines. That’s how they know it’s accurate. And then they will double-check it with a measuring tape, and then they will triple-check it with something like maybe a one-by-one piece of timber to make sure that everything is exactly equal between the strings. And if there are any variations, they’re very good at adding or taking away sand as they need to and then smoothing it out. It’s a pretty impressive process and I take a lot of pride and joy to be a part of a show that cares this much even though the audience never sees that.”Get more insight into Episode 10 in the full On Fire installment, below.Survivor, Wednesdays, 8/7c, CBS
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