Reality television has always kept viewers’ interest with drama and suspense. There are many ways this is brought about. Perhaps a singer won’t be good enough to win American Idol. Maybe an engagement will be broken, and a couple won’t walk down the aisle on 90 Day Fiancé. A child’s dreams could even be crushed in an episode of Dance Moms.
For fans of Survivor, this suspense has to do with the contestants’ fate. Will they be able to survive the situation and win the competition? The series usually involves some kind of challenge. In earlier seasons, food challenges were a common practice. While this was very entertaining for audiences, these challenges have since been stopped. The same thing recently happened with the combat challenges.
Jeff Responded To A Fan Who Asked Why Combat Challenges Are A Thing Of The Past
A show like Survivor has experienced a lot of changes over the course of its run. Things like the gong, the trunk of cash, and 39-day seasons are no more. The live show reunion is not even happening anymore. And the actual challenges on the show have changed as well. This particular change was questioned by a fan to host and showrunner Jeff Probst on a recent episode of his On Fire with Jeff Probst podcast.
“In early seasons, we saw a lot of head-to-head combat challenges where players might wrestle one another to try and push each other off a platform into the mud,” the fan asked. “I think I understand why these challenges no longer happen, but I miss the emotional fallout that resulted from getting out-muscled by a worthy competitor. Would you consider bringing challenges like these back to increase the chances of personal vendettas and moments of heroism?”
When answering the question, Jeff said that while the challenges on the show remain very physically demanding, there are certain lines the team just won’t cross anymore.
“It’s a really fair question,” Jeff began. “And it also speaks to the idea that if you had a different group of people in charge of Survivor, we might have a lot of these challenges. Survivor could have gone the route of The Challenge show and make it more physical and all of that. We just took a different approach. But I would say in terms of why we don’t have those, there wasn’t a defining moment when we decided to back off of these types of challenges.”
Schmergen Brawl has become known as a defining moment in the show. In what was essentially a different version of basketball, the contestants had to wrestle each other for balls in a pit. Ben Browning was disqualified for kicking another contestant in the leg the first time this challenge was run. Mike Borassi, meanwhile, was medevaced. The following season, the challenge was run again for Heroes vs. Villains. This resulted in yet another player being injured. That player was James Clement, who suffered a bad knee injury. This was the last time that challenge was run.
“There was a period, it was like three or four seasons in a row where we all started feeling, are we pressing a little too hard on the physicality?” Jeff said, “especially in the one-on-one or two-on-two challenges, because we don’t want the challenges to be so physical that it’s likely somebody will get hurt.”
Despite this, injuries still happen on Survivor. Bruce Perreault experienced a concussion and Kevin Leung suffered a dislocated shoulder during Seasons 44 and 48. “Of course, injuries do sometimes happen,” Jeff continued. “But for the most part, anybody can run these challenges. You may fall, you may get scraped up, but you’re not going to break a bone. But again, like everything on Survivor, it’s about balance and point of view and we’re doing our best to manage it.”
Following Jeff’s response, his co-host Rachel LaMont asked about a challenge that was her personal favorite. “Which challenge I really like that we haven’t seen in a while, Jeff, is Sumo at Sea, where they have the big bean bag and they shove each other in the water. I feel like you’re not likely to get hurt, but it’s so fun to watch people kind of pummel each other in that way.”
Sumo at Sea first appeared in Season 10 of Survivor: Pulau and was run for the last time in Season 29 of San Juan del Sur. This is one of those challenges the show wants to avoid at all costs. “That was one of the ones that made this shift happen,” Jeff revealed.
“There was something we noticed,” he continued. “The one-on-one-ness of it got into something really primal inside people and it became a little more like angry, like, ‘I’m going to knock you off.’ And it added a layer of dynamic that yes, to Ben’s point, it is compelling, but it’s going to take your game in a certain direction, and it’s just not what we want.”
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Jeff then explained that he is looking for the spirit of tough competition without anyone resorting to physical fighting. “We want it to be physical and adrenaline and all of that, but we don’t want it to be, ‘I’m going to knock you off this fricking platform.’ That’s just not the show we’re looking for.”
The Combat Challenges Aren’t The Only Challenges That Have Been Banned From The Show
In addition to the combat challenges, the food challenges were a staple of past seasons of Survivor. Sometimes, this would call for contestants to ingest food from foreign countries. To say the food was not palpable to the taste buds of Western society would be an understatement.
John Kirhoffer, a producer on Survivor, opened up to HuffPost about the challenges. He explained that they could come across as xenophobic by today’s standards. John said that this was due to the intention to gross out American viewers with the show’s depiction of foreign food. John revealed this is the main reason the show has stopped doing the food challenges.
“We started with Season 1 [saying], ‘Here’s something that the locals eat as a delicacy. This is what local people survive on.’ And then when Fear Factor got ahold of it, they went, ‘Here’s something that won’t kill you if you eat it,’ so it became more about that,” he said. “The closest to the edge that we got of not quite what the locals do was our Survivor smoothies, where we’d take a whole bunch of things that they do eat and put them in a blender and have (the show’s contestants) drink it down.”
Jeff Probst spoke more during an episode of the On Fire podcast as to why the show has stopped doing food challenges. Jeff said that he did research to see if a similar food challenge could be included in Survivor 45, but since the food can’t be shipped from other countries, he decided against the idea.
In an interview with People, Jeff described how he would explain the challenges to contestants. According to Jeff, audiences watch only a small part of what actually takes place play out on screen.
“What you see me tell the players on the show is the most basic description of the challenge,” Jeff said. “We do this so the audience can get a big picture idea of how it works. Then, off-camera, I take each tribe separately through the entire challenge with our challenge team.”
2:04
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“We explain the challenge in detail and answer any questions they have,” he continued. “This is a very interesting process because you can see the different strategies for each tribe starting to form. We do the same thing with individual challenges. We never run a challenge until everyone understands all the layers.”
In Survivor Auction, Jeff gives castaways $500 to bid on a variety of items. These items can be tasty treats like french fries and peanut butter to more bizarre things like dead bats. Jeff will sometimes announce the food to be auctioned off, and sometimes he will keep it a secret, suggesting the item being offered will be something other than food.
The contestants can either spend the money on food or save the money for other strategies further down the road. It has grown into a fan favorite on the series. However, it hasn’t appeared on the show for a long time, despite getting a positive reception. Player Christian Hubicki has said this is because Jeff thinks the challenge is boring.
“Jeff said the Survivor auction, in his estimation, will not come back,” Christian told The Hollywood Reporter. “I told him I liked it! His reasoning was that it’s not as interesting to watch hungry people eat food anymore. But for me, I think the issue is more that people have gamed the auction to death, ever since Shirin did what she did in Worlds Apart about paying $20 for letters. That takes away the uncertainty. If there’s a way where they can bring it back in Season 39 as a surprise or whatever, I think it would be a hit.”
He added, “I gave him all my critiques about Survivor Game Changers, which I’m sure he appreciated. Then he said at some point, ‘Christian, have you ever seen the movie The King of Comedy, which I had not. He said it was a movie where a deranged man abducts the king of comedy and declares himself the king of comedy. He said, ‘I feel like I’m the abducted guy right now who can’t escape from the basement.'”
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John Kirhoffer, however, seemed to think there was a chance Survivor Auction could make a return to audiences in the future.
“The game has shifted to be more strategic,” John told HuffPost. “Everything you see ― every challenge, every reward ― there’s an advantage hidden somewhere, usually. There’s a potential for strategy. So the auction just became about people saving their money, waiting for the advantage. We love the auction, though. There’s a very good chance you’ll see it in the next few years.”
Survivor
- Release Date
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May 31, 2000
- Network
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CBS
- Showrunner
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Jeff Probst
- Directors
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Jeff Probst
- Writers
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Jeff Probst
