It’s hard to believe, but the first season of Survivor aired more than 19 years ago. A lot has changed since that first season, but I took the time to pick out the biggest differences between that historic first season and the current show.
Nineteen years ago, reality television was turned on its head, as CBS aired the first episode of Survivor. The show stranded 16 strangers on an island and forced them to live together on an island in what was indeed the greatest social experiment we had ever seen. Survivor was ahead of its time, and when it first aired, there wasn’t anything else like it on television.
While we’ve all come to know and love Survivor over the 19 years it’s been on the air, I find it interesting to go back and re-watch season 1 and see how much the show has changed. The show premiered in 2000, and the world has changed a lot since then obviously.
We won’t dive into the obvious differences between the year 2000 and the present day, but more or less what the show was like back then as opposed to now.
Jeff Probst: From host to play-by-play showrunner
One of the most significant differences was that Jeff Probst, who somehow hasn’t aged at all in 19 years, served as the narrator throughout the season. At times, he’d be standing on the beach, talking to the camera and discussing that day’s challenge or what had happened the night prior. He’d also sit at Tribal Council, again talking to just us, before everyone arrived to sort of sum up what the tribe was going through.
Nowadays, Probst still serves as the narrator, but mostly throughout the challenges, which can be pretty annoying. He did not do this in season 1, but rather a prompt would scroll across the bottom of the screen with which tribe was leading or trailing.