Survivor 41 Review

Risky shipwheels 🏴‍☠️, broken hourglasses ⏳, deathly lockboxes 🔥, and unrollable dice 🎲. And a few friends made along the way. Reviewing the entire season of Survivor 41. Was it good, bad, or somewhere in between? Is it a top tier season or one of the worst?

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[Spanproyecto]

So many of these twists had one central problem for me: They punished players for COMPETING - in a challenge, by finding an idol, etc. We want to watch the players who show up to play actually succeed or at least go out trying. Not have their game then come down to chance or have their game be exposed by a stupid phrase.

[sunshine__daniel]

Honestly my dream at this point is to make it on the show, win, and in the finale shoutout Peridiam for basically mentoring me all these years

[freddytang]

A big problem I have with this season is that Heather got purpled mostly because she never had any advantage or idol. She did strategize especially with Erika but the edit completely ignored that. This sets a precedent that if you don’t play a flashy game with idols and advantages, you might as well not exist on the show

[DylanisHere]

This season suffered from a really bad winners edit in my opinion. I think Erika played a better game than the show runners showed and if they had restructured some of the episodes with BTS footage you can find online (not to mention everything they get that we don’t see) people wouldn’t be so upset. However I also will agree that I don’t understand why the jury hated Xander’s game so much, he did very well and I think he’s only a few mistakes away from the win near the end, but that’s too many mistakes sometimes.

[autumn]

i wish the friendship between heather and erika was shown. women need to see more genuine female friendships on reality tv

[Nobobase]

They needed to take like 1% of the energy they took into editing the jury and put it towards the winner and final 5 haha. I get wanting to hide the winner and the outcome but they really just blew all their editing/storyline momentum so early, it was weird. There’s gotta be a better way!

[GeauxWyatt]

Jeff/Production tried SO hard to mess up this season. They took an incredibly solid cast and bogged them down early with crazy advantages and twists. LUCKILY this cast was so good at playing the game they really nullified the damage that could’ve been done. I hope production sees that a season can and should be driven by its cast and their relationships. That’s what makes the “social experiment” work so well. It’s the reason 70 million people watched the Borneo finale, and it’s the reason the show can still be so gripping 41 seasons in! We should pay attention to how different people play the game, not the game itself. This cast delivered and I can’t think of a season with more genuine emotion throughout in a long time. Some elements really need tweaking, and some things need to go in the garbage. But hopefully 41&42 are just the growing pains of finding out what the next 10 years of Survivor are all about!

[crouton]

I thought Xander had it in the bag. But then watching his poor performance at final tribal and Erika’s amazing performance I had some doubts. Hearing the jury talk about Xander’s lack of social awareness, it makes sense that he didn’t win. That seemed to be what the jury valued. Xander misread them hard.

[moviemaniac]

The cast was never the problem, in fact it was easily the best newbie cast since DvG. It makes me wonder if this would’ve been a top tier season (like DvG) had there not been so many terrible advantages and twists introduced.

[jordancadiz]

Hourglass really did piss me off. Danny was visibly frustrated by it and I don’t blame him because he literally did get punished for winning

[amberschulz]

I am not upset at all that Erika won, I could see her game play, especially in these last couple episodes. But what I am upset about is that Xander got 0 votes from the jury. I think he deserved at least a few because he did have great game play.

[spenkle]

This season is a perfect example of why the only hidden advantage should be idols, and to do away with all the extra bs and just give us more screen time of the players and their interactions with everyone else. With that being said, this season did have my favorite cast and winner probably since season 33, and there are probably a good 5 or 6 of them I wouldn’t mind seeing play again

[jberczi]

The cast was not bad, the editing and weird twists/advantages were

[Bruhlie]

Here's a way I just thought of to make the hourglass twist work: still have the two teams of 5 with 2 people unpicked at the merge. The team that wins gets to skip tribal council completely, and they pick one person to go with them. The other person gets sent to exile island, where they choose if they want to join the group of 6 who avoids tribal completely, or join the group of 5 going to tribal, only they get immunity and can't be voted out. It still gives a lot of power to the person on exile, but there is no obvious choice for what to do like before. Erika could have chosen to stick with her old tribe + Ricard in an attempt to not make any early enemies, or try and help Heather survive a vote with Yase + Shan.

[ActiveAdvocate]

If they were to remove the drag-me-by-the-throat pace, and go back to the original 39 days post-COVID, though, a season like this could work a lot better. I legitimately LIKED the people for as far as I got to know them. My problem is, I VASTLY prefer character-based stories to plot-based ones. So if I don't know your characters, I don't care.

[hogziller]

I actually had many many problems with this first is right from the start Jeff Probst when Jeff states that is gong to be like "old time Survivor" proceed to be everything old survivor was multiple idols, multiple twists, exile island, only 26 day, spoon fed lines from Jeff and no all of these did not occur in the early seasons. Survivor is no longer a social experiment and survivor show where they would integrate the culture for the location they are in, they are more a entertainment show with the producers throwing as much sand in the gears (as the viewers will allow) to see what crazy voting scenarios would occur. Frankly they could just do this show somewhere in the desert just outside Los Angeles and achieve the same result the way it is produced now. The last couple years you can tell they are getting cheaper and cheaper with staying only on Fiji to combining more and more reward/immunity challenges to now the reduction in days on the island.

[katzman]

Thank you for including Heather's "Whatchu singin' over there??" The most classic line of the season :). Always a great job Peridiam!!!

[coreyellis]

Showing Erika and Heather working together earlier in the season would have helped this season so much. They clearly played from the start they just weren’t flashy which such a disservice. Especially during the merge where they were honestly critical from final 10 onward.

[cm]

I mean… it wasn’t the worst? There’s just so much that I was expecting from it especially after the break. And it feels like they didn’t meet the insane hype and standards that they were leading on.

[christopherward]

I think Jeff Probst and Production did a disservice to an outstanding cast and a deserving winner. Probst was about an 11 on the season's insufferability index and the number and scope of the twists/advantages in my opinion detracted from my enjoyment of the game and nearly stifled the gameplay and strategy that was occurring organically from the cast. Not to keep harping on Jeff Probst, but the self-congratulatory tone in which he touted the "great social experiment" of Survivor at any and every opportunity was obnoxious.

As much as I liked Xander he torpedoed his game at the final 4 tribal council by attempting to tell the jury what they were thinking. Erika had an outstanding FTC and articulated her gameplay expertly (I would also say that with the exception of one momentary pause Xander also performed well at FTC). I am happy with Erika as the winner but I think Probst/production overcooked Season 41, akin to overdoing a steak by smothering it with sauces and embellishments. Let it breathe.