Review – Survivor: One World

Survivor: One World – CBS – 8:00/7:00pm Wednesday – USA

Survivor is back and like most seasons these days there’s a ‘twist’ to stop the show feeling stale even though most of these twists are forgotten about three episodes into any new season. The twist of One World is that there are two tribes but only one camp. The tribes are divided by gender with a male side and a female side and all of the ‘girl power’/‘guys are stronger than girls’ nonsense that that division implies. By dividing the teams by gender it makes it far easier to keep track of who’s who on which tribe now that everybody is intermixing. We have to take the first episode of any new season of Survivor with a grain of salt, because even a dreadful season like Nicaragua started well enough and it’s not until Jeff  announces the winner that we can know for sure if a season was good or not.

Speaking of which, let’s take a moment to reminisce about the pretty good but not great last season where there seemed to be two camps – those that loved Cochrane and those that hated Cochrane and loved Ozzy. Now, if you thought Ozzy was amazing despite his only talent being his never-ending love for himself and despised Cochrane for whatever reason we can no longer be Survivor-friends. If, like me, you loved the nebbish, nervous, perpetual underdog Cochrane despite his lack of prowess at much of anything beyond talking himself into trouble then we are obviously Survivor-soulmates. It baffles me how anybody could find Cochrane “stabbing his alliance in the back” remotely bad – oh no, the guy everybody picked on finally stood up for himself against the wishy-washy Dawn, the sulky Ozzy, the pair of toolbags known as Jim & Keith and Courtney who hadn’t ever given him the time of day, what a selfish jerk… The only reason any of them thought that was a ‘bad move’ on Cochrane’s behalf was because it sent them home. It doesn’t matter how many times Jim rolls his eyes when Cochrane speaks; Cochrane still beat Jim because Jim sucks.

Anyway, those jerks are gone and we’ve got a whole new collection of jerks to get acquainted with. As all of the castaways are introducing themselves to Jeff we get one of my favourite moments from any Survivor season. We meet Tarzan, an old moustachioed man named Greg who insists the world calls him Tarzan. After he introduces himself we get a piece to camera from long-haired gentleman who looks like Coach’s older brother. This guy laments “he can’t be Tarzan, I’m Troyzan.” It seems that in the real world Greg goes by Tarzan, and Troy goes by Troyzan and that is so goofy and hilarious it had me convinced we may be in for the best season ever. Unfortunately we didn’t meet anybody else as inherently ridiculous as the ‘zan brothers.

We did get to meet a gang of shirtless alpha male types who quickly form a four person alliance (in a nine person tribe, thus establishing their strong grasp of mathematics). The leader Matt makes a big puffy deal about how the ‘young fit guys’ are going to go all the way, which as anybody who’s watched this show knows means that all of those ‘young fit guys’ aren’t going to make it very far because alliances of ‘young fit guys’ are always doomed to failure. As for the women the loudest and bitchiest of them all Alicia forms an alliance with the ‘strong girls’ and even though she figures out that she needs five people to make an alliance she also quickly establishes herself as the ‘most annoying person in this season’ by yelling at one of her teammates because she dared make a deal with the guys that got the girls fire. I mean the outrage that this woman would offer up goods and services in exchange for something – it is just so horrific and it should certainly be called out in front of everybody.

In order to make a good season of Survivor you need heroes and you need villains and you need those heroes to defeat those villains. That’s why in my opinion Cook Islands is by far the greatest season of Survivor – not only did you have Yul, the best Survivor winner, but you had his underdog alliance fighting against the awful empty-headed ‘white people’ alliance. You can’t manufacture a season like that, as the dozen not-so-great Survivor seasons will remind you. It’s one of the reasons Sophie winning South Pacific was so boring – it just didn’t make for an interesting narrative. Unlike Boston Rob winning the season before which brought the anti-hero back to finally prove his Survivor prowess. What I’m trying to say is that judging a season of Survivor on the first episode or even the first half of the season is a fool-hearty exercise – every new season brings with it the possibility that this will be the greatest season of Survivor ever, until it all falls apart.

A good season of Survivor also needs to balance the nasty with the fun – a season where things get particularly nasty without being terribly fun is a drain to watch. The biggest problem with One World so early in its run is that the show seems to be at a level of nastiness usually reserved for the back end of the season. Men vs. women seasons usually bring out the worst in everyone and shoving them together in the one camp has produced a lot of drama but it makes almost everybody wholly unlikeable especially as we don’t really know anybody yet. When my only rooting interests were in Kourtney who managed to injury herself out of the game and a badass sushi chef named Jonas it doesn’t leave me terribly confident we have a good season ahead of us, but as I’ve already stated, only a fool would pass judgement on a season of Survivor this early in its run so I will sit hoping to be proven wrong.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright