If you gave Jeff Probst truth serum 23 years ago and asked him how many seasons of Survivor—at that point, just an idea sketched out on a whiteboard in Hawaii—he would make, what would he have said? He thinks about it for a second, flashing the smile that’s helped make him one of the faces of reality television, a genre he helped pioneer. “No one’s ever asked me the question that way,” he says. “In the summer of 2000, as we were producing the first season, I would have said three.”
The 45th season of Survivor premieres on CBS on Wednesday, making it one of the most prolific shows in American history. Since the very first contestants arrived on a beach off the coast of Borneo more than two decades ago, the show has developed an insatiable fan base, inspired countless fantasy leagues and Reddit posts, sold truckloads of merchandise, and, of course, far outlasted Probst’s initial estimate. Children who grew up watching the show are now applying to be on it; people who gathered around a bulky television set to watch with their parents are now streaming it with their own kids. There have been many changes, but one thing has remained constant: People are still watching the hell out of Survivor. And during the show’s lifespan, Probst has gone from the host known mainly for his blue tactical outdoor gear, to executive producer and showrunner, to someone that an unknowably high number of people view as a de facto family member.
“Brace yourself for this one,” he begins. “There’s a player on a recent season of Survivor who said to me, ‘You were like a father figure to me—now it’s more like a granddad.’ I don’t look in the mirror and see a granddad! I remember my dad telling me that you don’t know you’re the old guy until you are.” Now 61 years old, his hair still tousled, Probst bristles at the idea that he’s some sort of sex symbol. But do a quick Twitter or Google search for ‘Jeff Probst zaddy’ and see for yourself. Probst, by the way, is unfamiliar with the term zaddy. I give him a brief rundown. “Fatherly, brutal,” he deadpans. “I like it in that context because at least it’s a flattering assassination. But no, I have not heard that.”
I have a confession for Probst. I grew up as a diehard Survivor fan, one who never missed an episode and developed parasocial relationships with some of the contestants. I was a child maturing right alongside the show, and it fully had its hooks in me. I remember an end-of-the-year party in elementary school that was Survivor-themed, as well as the adjacency to fame I felt when a classmate’s aunt got cast. But as I got older, I took a break. Other interests got in the way, and it became harder to keep up every week. Then I went off to college and, truthfully, rarely thought about Survivor anymore.
“That is so common,” Probst assures me. “I hear two things: never missed an episode, and if I did miss an episode, it was when I was in college. You’re creating your own life and your own adventure. What’s cool is how many people come back after college. You can dip out! That’s okay! Just come back.” That’s exactly what I did. After watching society begin to discover, embrace, or rediscover the show during the pandemic, I decided to jump back in for season 42 early last year. After refamiliarizing myself with the rhythms of the show—and learning a bunch of new ones—I was immediately transported back to my childhood.
“COVID—as difficult as it was to go through as a planet—a lot of new fans discovered Survivor,” Probst accepts. Netflix licensed some of the juiciest seasons, and with everyone cooped up inside, the nation turned its lonely eyes to Probst. He says he encounters people all the time who used lockdown as a gateway to binge every season. But one thing was consistent. “The same players and the same themes and the same moments stood out to everybody,” he says, before name-dropping a few players who have earned one-name status among the fan base, the Survivor versions of Beyoncé or Rihanna. “There’s a reason people still like Boston Rob, or Cirie, or Parvati, or Tyson. You would like them at any point! They’re interesting people!”
In conversation, Probst is about as charismatic as you’d expect someone who’s shot over 630 episodes of network television to be. He is affable and attentive, taking time to write something that I tell him down so he can look it up later. He’s definitely got some of the LA positivity sheen now—Probst grew up in Wichita, Kansas and moved to the Seattle suburbs during high school—but in a way that comes from unalloyed gratitude, not trying to falsely convince himself that everything is hunky-dory. Obviously, the financial benefits of a CBS hit help tremendously, but so does the innate way he thinks and moves about the world. “I’m not just a bullshitter saying I’m grateful,” he asserts. “I’m grateful every fucking morning. I can’t believe this is my life.”
The beauty of Survivor is in the concept. Castaways arrive and are split into tribes. Each episode usually features two challenges between the tribes—one for some type of reward, like food or supplies, and the other for immunity that protects you from getting voted out. Every episode ends at Tribal Council—where Probst holds court about what’s been happening on the island—and ends with someone getting voted out. About halfway through each season, the tribes merge into one, and the challenges go from being team-based to individual. Making it until the merge also means you make the jury, the people who sit in on all post-merge councils. Once the remaining contestants are whittled down to a final three, they plead their case for $1 million to the jury, who cast their votes for a winner in the finale. The concept has been mostly the same for 23 years.
If you take a bunch of strangers, put them on a remote island with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and make them coexist while voting someone out every episode, all in pursuit of $1 million, it doesn’t really matter what type of people you’re putting onscreen. There’s definitely certain archetypes that the fans like, though. In recent years, there’s been a clamoring for more hot-and-steamy romance, and Probst tells me that there is a couple on the upcoming season, though they never cast with matchmaking in mind. The other beauty of the show—especially, and critically, in this current moment—is that there are no writers.
“I’m not putting on a show, which is why there’s no writers, and there never have been,” Probst expresses. “I don’t need anyone to write for me. I just watch and react in real time. You might not like the way I talk or how I comment during a challenge. But I hope that when you watch me, you do believe that I’m authentic, because it is me.” Obviously, with a show of this nature, Probst is always being asked what’s real and what’s staged. In his words, “It’s the most real experience you can have. Ask any player. There is zero help, never ever.”
That means zero, including all of one’s normal bathroom needs. “The smell is real. It’s kind of a combination of a campfire and a gym locker that hasn’t been opened in a decade,” he says. “It’s a very unique, rank smell.” The bamboo toothpick has become a common invention to stave off dental issues, and in lieu of toilets, well, just look around. “The aqua dump is very popular,” Probst says. “They have areas and code names for it. Their bathroom is whatever they can figure out in the jungle. It’s typically digging a hole or something like that. One of the things my mom used to always ask me was, You’re telling me they don’t get cleaned up before Tribal [Council]? They look really good! I’d say, ‘Mom, that’s just firelight. It’s flattering!’”
Fame, now a comfortable jacket for him, has come slowly for Probst. Unlike, say, movie stars, who can have one big release that changes their life overnight, he’s been operating at a slow simmer since 2000. He still has the luxury of being able to walk around mostly unbothered. He generally takes a backseat to the contestants, the true engine of the show. His only real moments on camera come when the contestants are either getting their asses kicked in a challenge or on the verge of being voted out. His signature line at the end of each episode—the tribe has spoken—has taken on a life of its own, but for the most part, he’s just chilling in tropical locales watching everything unfold like the rest of us.
Perhaps that’s why his uptight peers struggle to understand him. “The most common question that I get asked in Hollywood is also the most telling: They always ask, ‘So what else are you working on?’ They never ask how else I spend my time when I’m not working on Survivor. I always find it fascinating that work is the question, not what. There are a lot of things that I like. I like producing Survivor. But I also like playing tennis, and going out to dinner with my friends, and watching TV and rubbing my wife’s feet at night, and getting an impromptu ice cream with my daughter, or secretly listening to our son jam on his guitar in his bedroom. If I can do all of that, and I have time to do something else? I’m in! Otherwise, I’m out.”
The fact that he’s still in—a world away from that first season when all he had was Mark Burnett and a dream—tells you everything you need to know. And it truly is a different world. Survivor is currently in the throes of what fans, contestants, and Probst himself have dubbed “the new era.” Due to pandemic restrictions, season 41 was the first that spanned just 26 days instead of the traditional 39. That season also introduced several new twists and turns, some of which feel a tad gimmicky and have upset the purists online. It’s not unlike the “moneyball” trends that have happened in professional sports: Whether it’s basketball players living at the three-point line, hitters swinging for the fences at the expense of their batting average, or Survivor contestants hoarding all the advantages they can get, the game has undeniably changed with the times. The list of changes that have hit Survivor like a tidal wave is long, and ranges from the socially important to the somewhat kooky. The air date has switched from Thursday to Wednesday, and Probst no longer tests the challenges himself. The singer Sia—a Survivor superfan—gives away thousands of dollars of her own money to contestants she finds interesting. The pandemic also forced the show to settle on one location, rather than globetrotting like it used to. After shooting early seasons in places like Australia, Brazil, China, and Kenya, Survivor has found a somewhat permanent home in Fiji. Probst has twice pitched the idea of CBS just buying an island to house the show in perpetuity.
There’s also stark cultural differences between the Survivor of then and the Survivor of now. The challenges were once much more physically brutal. Contestants used to get naked. The very first winner, Richard Hatch—who later spent four years in prison for failing to report his winnings to the IRS—called himself the naked gay guy. When he returned for an all-star season, his naked body came in contact with another contestant during a challenge, causing her to voluntarily quit days after the incident. In the early 2000s, contestants also had a tendency to be a little more nasty to each other. Sue Hawk’s vicious, cutting rat vs. snake speech from that inaugural season is an indelible part of not just Survivor lore, but reality TV as a whole—and is something that just wouldn’t happen anymore. (On a different note, longtime fans will be excited that Probst confirmed that the beloved Survivor auction is coming back this season.) The show looks, feels, and sounds different today because it has to.
“George Cheeks—President of CBS Entertainment and Paramount Plus—came out with a mandate during COVID: more diversity,” Probst tells me. “This is not a request, it’s a demand. It will go down as one of the greatest things that ever happened to Survivor, because it forced us to work harder. We didn’t realize how narrow our diversity was. We thought we were doing a good job, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know. I’m not saying that we solved it, but we’re definitely more aware and working every season to get better, not just for people on the show, but also on the crew.” Survivor is no stranger to issues of diversity. Much like Real World, one of its fellow soldiers on the front lines of unscripted reality TV, Survivor was met with criticism for how it depicted Black people during the early seasons.
In the long history of the show, there have only been five Black winners. After Vecepia Towery won the fourth season, a Black woman did not win again until season 42. That edition included a tearful moment at Tribal Council in which contestant Drea Wheeler and eventual winner Maryanne Oketch spoke about the differences between playing the game as a Black person and playing the game as a white person. There was also a moment in 2017 during Survivor: Game Changers, where transgender contestant Zeke Smith was outed by another contestant on national television, which became a global headline. Who could forget Survivor: Cook Islands, the 2006 season that grouped contestants into tribes based on their race? Survivor: Island of the Idols, the 39th installment, featured the first contestant to ever be removed by the production team. The contestant in question, Dan Spilo, was issued a warning after repeatedly touching other contestants inappropriately, but was not removed until an off-camera incident. Probst acknowledges that nothing will ever be perfect, and he’s very wary of reducing contestants to just some viral moment, but he also knows that things have gotten better. He is, in fact, the guy who’s seen anything and everything from this show that just refuses to die.
“Our casting process has gotten a lot more sophisticated,” he says. “We know as much about the player as their family does. Players are shocked by how many interviews [they do] with our casting team and how many psychological tests they take. We care deeply about them. We have an aftercare program. We check in with them and want to know about their health, mental and physical. We try to help them navigate social media and the highs and lows that come with all of that. We try to prepare them for the end of a season, and what it’s going to feel like when there’s a new season. We really do invest in them. We understand it’s an insane emotional journey.”
Forget one season, 23 years is an insane journey for the fans as well. The show has undeniably evolved from the era where women stripped their clothes off for peanut butter, but it’s also had a micro-evolution in this decade alone. The queer community has latched on in a big way, helping change the national perception of the show. For instance, the show The Other Two—which ran from 2019 to 2023—has a joke in its first season about how Survivor is “violently straight.” By the final season, reflecting a real-life trend, it’s depicted as something that gay people gather to watch. I ask Probst if he’s aware of the queer community’s recent attraction to the show. “I don’t know what the attraction is, but I’m delighted,” he says. “I hope it has something to do with representation. In the early days, I wasn’t that involved in the casting, and it was a different world. But I can tell you today, we cast for diversity in all ways.” That showed up last season, when Yam Yam Arocho became the first openly gay person of color to win. In total, six of season 44’s 18 contestants identified as queer, including two of the final three left standing.
Probst says that their yearly applicant number is somewhere in the thousands, and his number one pet peeve is when people tell him they’ve always wanted to be on the show but have never actually applied. He compares the game (26 days of psychological warfare) to a monster in a horror movie that wants to slaughter you, and the show (the actual cuts of television that fans see at home) to a murder mystery where the central dramatic question is who will get killed. If that sounds intense, it’s because it is! “Some people go 18, 19, 20 days with nothing,” he reminds me. “Cognitively, that impact is pretty severe. That’s why at the end of every season you hear people talk about how they cried several times and can’t believe what they learned about themselves. I’m going to be a better husband and I’m going to be a better dad and I’m going to quit that job that sucks.” He’s prone to literary similes and metaphors when describing the show. It’s no surprise then when he reveals that before each season, he churns out a “creative bible.” Not a script, of course, but something he writes like a novel, meant to inspire the tone of a given season. He describes it like, “And when it was over, there was nothing left but the blood…” kind of stuff.
The man clearly loves his job, perhaps more than anyone I’ve ever met. He spends an hour and 15 minutes with me talking about it, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say he could have easily done an hour and 15 more. When asked for a favorite season, he lists 10 of them. There have been bumps and bruises, a divorce, and pre-Survivor jobs that he didn’t get. But, to use a Probstism, he’s always been the type of guy to go full-tilt boogie, focusing all of his energy on the task at hand, whether it’s making a canonical television show or talking about that show in a Zoom interview.
“There is nothing else that I could want out of my career,” he says now. “The cherry on top is that it’s about humans. Getting abandoned with a group of strangers is analogous to getting lost from your mom at an amusement park. Being voted out is analogous to being picked last for a sports team. Those are fundamental things in our core. When we’re watching it, we’re feeling how we would react if that was us. We often have these big obstacle courses [in Survivor challenges] and people ask if they can go around it. No! You have to go up and over. That’s the metaphor!”