Survivor’s Flanderization
How to Survive Almost Two Decades of Being on TV
Television fans may be familiar with the term “Flanderization.” It’s a TV Trope that originated from the Simpsons. The family’s neighbour, Ned Flanders, started off as the mirror image to Homer. He was attentive to his kids, hard-working, fit, and happened to also be Christian. Over time, Ned gradually became solely focused on his religion and turned into a religious nutcase.
In a way, Ned was a fully fleshed character when the show began and somehow devolved over time to become a joke machine focused on religion. Much in the same way that Barney became a joke about drinking or being gross or Ralph went from slightly dim-witted to a full-blown special-ed student who shouldn’t even be in the 2nd grade.
Flanderization occurs because the more time goes on, the more the Simpsons needed to create outrageous situations to be funny (and lord knows the show has gone on more than twice as long as it should have by now). How does this relate to reality television and more specifically, Survivor? While the show keeps a mostly unique cast of players from season to season, Survivor has found its own way to Flanderize itself and it happens by means of production.
Those who have been around since the beginning (as the show nears its second decade, this has got me feeling damn old) remember the freshness of Survivor: Borneo. Nobody had ever seen anything like this and even going into the season, people wondered what was going to happen. They were going to be on a deserted island? How long were they going to be there? Someone was being eliminated each week… how does that happen? Are people going to die? And yes, people legitimately wondered if the contestants might die on the show.
Then we got to watch a couple of seasons and the audience started to understand the format. Survivor: Australian Outback was three days longer, for those delicious television dollars, but ostensibly the exact same. Two tribes and a merge. You have tribal council where people get voted off. Eventually, at final nine, the jury begins and those people eventually decide the winner between the last two contestants left standing. For the audience, we were now comfortable with the formula, everything made sense.
The problem for production was keeping eyes on their product. If a comedy is worried about making you laugh, Survivor was worried about keeping fans interested. Richard Hatch had created the blueprint for winning Survivor and Tina Wesson had followed it closely to her own victory. If all it took was holding down a majority alliance to ride it out to the end, the audience was going to start and tune out future seasons because of its predictability.
So how did production propose combating that kind of expectedness? By messing with the game’s basic formula. That’s how we get to Survivor: Africa and Silas Gaithers manages to twist fuck himself at the first ever tribe swap. That was an artificial attempt by production at throwing some uncertainty into the game. A variable that couldn’t be quantified.
That was the first step in Survivor’s own Flanderization process. It’s never a full-blown flip, the change is gradual. Like somebody who starts with a nose job to fix a little imperfection only to end up with a fully refurbished body 5 years down the line.
Every time that production tinkered with its formula, the players had to figure out a way around this new change. In Australian Outback, Colby Donaldson and co. figured out how to game the show’s method for breaking tie votes. That forced production into introducing drawing rocks in Survivor: Marquesas. The players then adjusted by avoiding ties at every possible opportunity to the point that our next rock draw would only come 23 seasons later.
Survivor: All-Stars presented possibly the biggest change production could ever create. For all we knew, Survivor was always about perfect strangers coming together on a deserted island and learning how to survive together. The social experiment aspect of the show meant that the players being strangers was a huge part of the dynamic. In All-Stars, that was thrown out as almost all of the players knew each other by virtue of being part of a-then-small circle of former Survivors. All-Stars meant the dawn of a new age where players might now be given a second chance at playing the game.
Even with changes to the game, a big criticism that has always been levied at the show is that the minority often has nothing they can do. So, production went back to the drawing board and came up with an invention with hopes to fix that issue. Thus, in Survivor: Guatemala, the hidden immunity idol was born. That was another twist that completely changed how the game was played and contestants needed to plan for it. This is the era in which vote-splitting becomes a new trend and blindsiding your opponent becomes the ideal way to vote them out.
In another attempt to throw some better odds at a fan-favorite making it to the end, Survivor introduced the final three. Now three people would get a chance to partake in final tribal council and make their case for a million dollars. The intended impact was to help those “robbed” final three players who were voted out just short of their goal. In reality, of course, those players now ended up getting cut at final four instead.
From there, came another big change: Redemption Island. Barring Survivor: Pearl Islands, which was another formula-changing decision, no voted-out contestant had ever had the chance to return to the game. Now, two players were going to have a shot at coming back from death by fighting their way onto the island. Contestants now had to find a way to vote people out while maintaining enough diplomacy as to not incur their wrath should they come back.
By this point in the Flanderization process, the show was nothing like its original product. What was once a simple game had become big and complex. No vote was ever straightforward because of the multiple tools in place to impact the players. Because the votes became more strategically complex, they required more time to explore. More time means more attention in the episode devoted to the strategy of the game. As the seasons went on, original fans started noticing a trend where the show was moving towards showing the strategy of the season over the contestants’ stories. I’m not presenting this as either good or bad, simply how the show started to change with age.
Then a big change in the show’s identity came in the early 30s. Before, Survivor had always made it a point to move around to different locations and environments. It was one of the biggest pillars that made it Survivor. With the world economy changing and television as a medium falling further behind streaming services, production decided: the show was done moving around.
It set anchor in Fiji, Survivor’s permanent home since Survivor: Millennials vs Gen X. The new countries and locations were now a thing of the past, the swinging bachelor had become a homebody. This also meant that production could no longer title their seasons after their locations. They now needed to come up with themes to differentiate one Fiji season to the next.
If you ask me, this is where the insane Flanderization kicked in. The show started really leaning into its themes. Jeff Probst himself became a caricature of his earlier days and started hammering season themes to death at tribal council. In Millennials vs Gen X, he had to frame every decision from the perspective of what it meant to be from either generation. In Survivor: Ghost Island, Jeff harped on curses from past seasons that may or may not really have been cursed.
Of course, it would be impossible to mention this era of Survivor without mentioning the Final Four fire-making twist that was introduced in Survivor: Heroes vs Healers vs Hustlers. Because production was getting frustrated with multiple fan favorites being knocked out at final four, whereas it used to be at final three when only two people made it to final tribal council, production doubled down on their decision and made fire-making mandatory to survive the final four. Now, someone set to be voted out at final four had a last second chance at saving themselves through making fire (looking at you Ben Driebergen).
Fast-forward to the present time. We are less than a month away from Survivor 38, Survivor: Edge of Extinction. On this season, we will have four returning players, of whom three will be playing for their third time. Players who are voted out will be sent to Extinction Island. Think of it like a more extreme version of Redemption Island. There will be two chances to return to the game: at the merge and near the end. Players may leave Extinction Island at any time or stay until the end where the final player wins their chance to return.
That means that all 18 contestants could theoretically still be in the game on day 39. How does the jury work? How will this twist work in conjunction with the F4 fire-making twist? How will exit interviews work? Why is the show suddenly using quitting, an act Jeff and production have despised since Osten did it way back in Pearl Islands, as a legitimate method to leave a season?
All of these changes happened over time but like Ned Flanders, comparing the first season to the current is a striking change. If a Survivor fan from the early 2000s had been frozen and then thawed in the current day, they would understand almost 0% of a current Survivor season. I understand that production was never going to remain stagnant on the show’s formula, we wouldn’t be at season 38 without changes. For better or for worse, the show had to change and now here we are, on the precipice of potentially the weirdest season of Survivor we will ever get. It would only be weirder if somehow, Ned Flanders himself was cast for the show.
