Season Premieres: Survivor

Uh oh, this show is back.

And the one thing to discuss is the latest Big Twist courtesy of Mark Burnett: two former Survivors are back in the game. At the start of the show they were announced as a surprise and randomly matched to the two new tribes (which were already chosen before the show began). The players are Stephanie and Bobby Jon, the scrappy duo who ultimately made up Survivor's first ever tribe-of-two last season.

Of course the twist leaked out ahead of time, but watching it still felt disconcerting. It was if Survivor decided to take a page out of timeslot-rival The OC's self-referential playbook. There was more onscreen awareness than ever before that everyone is there to play Survivor, a TV game show. The other players were genuinely excited to see Steph and Bobby Jon and treated them like celebrities (conveniently distracting from the former NFL player hidden in plain sight). And the former players are able to give their teams advice on how best to approach challenges, not because they’ve seen the show on TV but because they’ve played it. That sort of openness is odd for a show that is usually so protective of the particular brand of fly-on-the-wall voyeurism it sells (taken to such extremes that during interviews with contestants who have been voted out the booted player will often refer to other players as still being at the location, even though filming has long since wrapped). But it’s not unwelcome.

The impact on the first episode was both good and bad. There was an immediate entry point with contestants, a familiarity, that usually takes time to develop, but Steph and Bobby Jon took up so much of the screen time and story interest that it was even harder than usual to get to know the new players (at least the ones who weren't vomiting their insides out, or the nurse who tended to them). When it came time to kick someone off it was pretty obvious it would be the 100-year-old man but, poor guy, we hardly even met him before it was time for him to go.

My biggest concern is the twist messing with one of the best dynamics of Survivor: the players have no previous knowledge of each other and only form relationships and opinions of each other during the game. The absence of that turned All Stars into a wretched parody of a typical Survivor season, the kind of stereotypical reality-TV trash that Survivor (narrowly) manages to avoid. But I don't think this idea will turn out nearly as bad as All Stars (or even the disastrous "Outcast tribe" idea several seasons back). Steph and Bobby Jon will have to work extra hard to even stay in the game. On a show that loves to mess with its audience this development is one more distraction from the same old, same old.