Survivor: Most invisible contestants of all-time

Survivor hasn’t always been great at giving contestants a fair amount of screen time. Who have been the most invisible players in Survivor history?

Editing Survivor isn’t an easy task. There’s 39 days worth of footage and the cameras never stop rolling, meaning when it’s all said and done, there’s over 900 hours of footage that needs to be trimmed down into 14 episodes (each episode is typically 40 minutes). Needless to say, the editors have their work cut out for them.

With so much footage and only so little time to air it in, it’s nearly impossible for everyone to receive a respectable amount of air time. Certain players get left out of the final edit while others flourish on the screen, sometimes to the point where it’s overwhelming (ie: Survivor: Samoa).

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at the contestants who were practically invisible on their given seasons. To put these rankings together, I mostly went by confessionals for each season. I used different graphs from Survivor Reddit, Survivor Oz, and around the internet to determine how many confessionals each castaway had. If there were multiple players with the same amount of confessionals, I broke the tie by how much other screen time those in question had.

It’s worth noting, however, that while some contestants might not have had a ton of confessionals, they still were on screen a lot and were a key part of the season. One of the best examples of this is Jessica Lewis from Millennials vs Gen-X. She had 19 confessionals through ten episodes and a big part of the show.

Before we begin, a requirement here is that only players who made it into the merge portion of the season were eligible. For seasons that had Edge of Extinction or a similar twist, we won’t be taking contestants booted early into account.

Also, there aren’t many photos of these contestants so I tried to find videos of them, but considering they were invisible, that proved difficult with some. I used several of Eager Turtle’s videos and some of those videos included confessionals that weren’t aired, so keep that in mind.