After watching the 24-hours-a-day insanity of Celebrity Big Brother over the past few weeks, there are lessons to learn that permeate even in Survivor.
Celebrity Big Brother left as quickly as it breezed into town. Serving as CBS’ alternative to NBC presenting the Winter Olympics to millions of fans across the United States, the miniature-sized season still managed to get a lot of people talking, including Survivor fans counting down the minutes until Survivor Ghost Island begins.
As with every reality competition program CBS has aired in the past few years, there were some ups and downs. There are a ton of differences between the two shows, but with the first Celebrity Big Brother taking place in the US, Survivor fans have a window into certain facets of production that they could either learn to incorporate or work hard to avoid.
One case of the latter … (Spoiler warning; we will discuss the events of the first Celebrity Big Brother, including who won!)
A finale night twist can always be worse
The quicker Survivor Ghost Island comes, the quicker I don’t have to beat the dead horse that is the Final Four twist from Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers! In it, not only did Chrissy win an “advantage” where, for the first time, the winner of the Final Immunity Challenge didn’t have a say in who was going home, but she could take just one other player while forcing a mandatory fire-making tiebreaker, potentially elevating the winner of that Tribal’s game.
If it seemed like that twist was unfair due to its game-shaking format change that the players didn’t know about, Celebrity Big Brother, arguably, gave much more power to the final Head of Household. That show’s Final Four twist allowed the winner of that competition to choose one of three players to bring with them to the end, giving them unprecedented control. Marissa Jaret Winokur picked Ross Mathews and beat him 6-3 in the process.
To me, Survivor is best when it’s balancing outwit, outplay and outlast. In modern seasons, the show has heavily strayed that balance in order to chase big moves, but even by changing the Final Four dynamics to give Ben Driebergen another shot at staying in the game, I still find that twist tame compared to the amount of power the winner of one quiz among dozens of competitions has compared to the rest of the game.