Survivor Cambodia: Season 31

For Survivor Cambodia: Second Chance's premiere, the cast will first be whisked away on a tour of the beautiful island.

"First, we took the Survivors on a little tour through Siem Reap and Angkor Wat in Cambodia draw a parallel of the history of this place that they’re going to be playing in to their own history and the idea of a second chance and the idea of seizing the moment," Jeff told EW.com. "If you don’t seize the moment, you’ll be the old temple with the trees growing around it. You know, you gotta live!”



After being dropped off on the coast of Koh Rong, the 20 castaways will revisit the first-ever Survivor challenge, which was completed 15 years ago.

From there, they'll grab a supply boat, board it, and take as many supplies as they can with them. However, this time, a new twist will make things much more challenging.

“There’s another boat 100 yards out with a big bag of rice, so here’s your dilemma... How much time do you want to spend gathering supplies before you split and race for the rice?,” Jeff said.

Things will get chaotic when nine people are paddling on a raft toward the rice and Kelly Wigglesworth swims ahead, followed by Woo Hwang, who takes over, and Joe Anglim, jumping in on behalf of the other Tribe.

Talk about an adrenaline-fueled first episode!

"It'll be a very exciting way to start," Jeff adds.

 

looking forward to it

best reality show on TV

i just can't figure out how the amazing race keeps winning all those emmy's when it is the most manipulated game show ever. ever wonder why no team on the amazing race ever, and i mean ever, gets way ahead?

 

I'm looking forward to this and I hope Kelly doesn't disappoint me. (my pre-show favorites are her and Joe)

 

Wow, more than a whole day later after the premier, and this thread is sitting barren and buried on page 7.

I'm a bit surprised that Abi was left in the game, she is such an obvious easy vote-out that doesn't hurt the team for future usefulness. This is yet another show that I have watched every episode from the very first season onward, and probably almost half of those people I have little or no memory of -- how and why would the public have voted to have them come back? Some others I do remember and wonder why would anyone want to suffer through having to put up with them again... and then there were a few that will be fun to see play again, for however long they may last. The premier seemed padded out with some boring filler to make it 90 minutes, but overall it looks like this could be a fairly interesting season.

 

I never liked Vytas so I have no difficulty with him being first out. However I wouldn't make fun of him and I don't consider it a black mark on his character or anything. I'm not crazy about Abi either.

I like where Kelley found a clue to the hidden immunity idol without having a preceding clue as to where to look for it (a twist on Russell Hantz's major contribution to Survivor, which was finding hidden immunity idols without a clue, if you don't count making it to the final tribal council and having everyone hate you enough to neglect to vote for you). At this point I'm cheering for Kelley and Spencer.

 

I'm the same way as far as noy remembering many of the past players. When they have All-Stars I generally have difficulty with many of the people. Also, there are people I remember but don't remember how much I liked them. It's a good idea to have the 2nd chance season. We'll see how this plays out.

I didn't see any scheming to get Vytas out. That was totally out of the blue for me. The way they edited it, it looked like Abi was a sure bet to be voted off. She wasn't as obnoxious as her first time around, and again, I didn't see or hear anyone talking about Vytas. Did I miss that? I know they try to focus on people talking about a couple people usually and we don't know who the real target is, but that was out of the blur for me. I think I'll enjoy this season.

 

about the fan voting, i think the pool of choices was rather limited by the producers. they probably had to contact everyone first to see if they were even interested. from what i understand they have tried to get colleen haskell to do the show again on many occasions. she had a very short career in show business after her survivor season and then just dropped off the face of the planet. i am sure there are others out there too that just want nothing more to do with it.

and i agree that some of the choices for this season just baffling, abi-marie, shirin, phei gie and fishback immediately come to mind....none of them were very liked even the first time around. but it is what it is and we'll just have to make the best of it.

and for the record, i can't stand abi-marie either, even her voice bothers me, but i believe she is one of those players that people keep around because no one would ever vote for her to win.

 

They showed a couple of the women complaining about him schmoozing them too hard, but it didn't seem enough of a reason or consensus to remove a strong person this early for the coming team competitions. I really don't see Abi helping the team win anything.

 

Like you, I thought she was the easy vote out last night. The editing only focuses on certain people though. I'm sure we'll see other people (like Shirin) who will be driving people up the wall also pretty soon too.

 

Yes, they do, on the Amazing Race. Most of the time the finales are boring because you can tell which ones are so far ahead that barring an act of God, they are going to win. Likewise, if you are in third place, unless the two teams ahead of you experience the worst luck in the history of man, you are going lose and make it to the finish line hours later.

 

I've watched every season except the first. While I fully admit I don't watch every episode intently, a lot of times I'm surfing the net while Survivor is on, I feel like I have seen enough to remember the players, at least a little. There are about 5-6-7 players that I can't remember at all. Maybe their appearances changed since they were on, but I think it's more that they just didn't make much of an impression. To me, odd casting choices.

 

Two episodes in and next week's preview already shows them mixing up the teams... into three -- ugh!

 

can you recall, even one time, when a team got an entire leg ahead of the rest of the pack?

i don't care how far ahead a team is, they fix it so that the next plane/train/car to the next place doesn't take off until ALL the teams catch up, they might have a staggered start to the next place, no one ever gets a whole leg ahead, or behind for that matter.

maybe on the final show, as you say, but even then, no team gets a whole leg ahead.

it is a terribly manipulated game in those terms, and i refuse to watch because of that.

 

That was surprising. Starting out with 20 players, I would have thought that they'd have split into 3 teams at the beginning of the show. I don't know if this is a matter of mixing things up just to throw in a twist or if they planned this before the show.

I was glad to see Shirin go. I didn't like her the first time around and wasn't sad to see her leave this time. I hope Spencer has better judgment (as he talked about last night) with how he plays the game from now on. I would think he'd do well. He just get's in with the wrong crowd.

 

I think it's simply a matter of logistics. If they let the race get too spread out, they would need active camera crews working in multiple countries simultaneously to capture all of the teams, at various points in the day (including the night). Plus, they would need to keep multiple road blocks and challenges set up for multiple days as each team worked their way through the race.

For example, if a challenge involved hearding goats, they want to have a reasonable expectation that everyone who played the challenge would play it in relatively the same time frame on the same day...even if the spread is a few hours apart from the first team to the last. Otherwise, you run the risk that a lagging team would come to the challenge at 4am the next day, when the conditions for the challenge weren't ideal.

 

I would be surprised if it wasn't planned well in advance. Since all of the players are experienced in the game, they immediately established alliances in their two-team format. If you then mix up the teams into three smaller teams after the alliances are established, it creates an instant chaos. People have to decide if they will stick with their original alliances or form new alliances with new team members. Some will take one approach, some with take the other approach, and some will try to play it somewhere in-between (and have multiple alliances). A regular mixup also helps to prevent one team from dominating in challenges.

 

Fair enough, you are right in that they don't let them get that far ahead because they all have to meet at stations for that certain leg unless it's a special episode or the finale. Each episode basically represents one leg of a journey. They do not give the first team the clue as to where they are going next and let them go off early. If they arrive at a location too late or too early, the location may be closed and they have to wait. Eventually some other people catch up to them and wait with them. Some teams don't catch up to them until they check in, after they've finished what they have to do. I quote former contestant Mark Abbattista who has this to say:

"Still, they can’t let anyone get too far out. It is a race and there has to be some kind of competition to it. If one team finished eight days ahead of everyone, that’s not a good TV show."

http://www.avclub.com/article/whats-it-like-to-be-a-contestant-on-the-amazing-ra-106277

If it wasn't televised as it's format then yeah, there would be no manipulation at all, but could you make that into a series, a compelling series? It wold just be an occasional race that you would check up online, since in that way, it wouldn't be on television. Same thing with Survivor, they have all of those other survival type shows, but without the manipulations in the game that the producers do, would it be as popular as it is? They have a 13 episode order, same as Survivor. They have to manipulate things in order to have enough footage to have a show, for 13-15 hours. All reality shows have some manipulation behind the scenes going on, including Survivor. Each time they go to tribal and Jeff mentions about situations or personalities or shortcomings of their tribe members, that's manipulating the game. We are going to see it next week when they decide to make three teams out of the two. Survivor, the old school used to be basically about surviving, then basically at the end you would have the social game. But now, as you can see the new school of Survivor is all about the social game. They hardly focus on anything on the survival aspect. You basically just see them lying around after the first episode where they've built the camp, just scheming about one another or thinking about or looking for the hidden immunity idol, another manipulation in the game.

The Amazing Race contestant, Mark Abbattista, was eliminated because his passport got stolen. You got to have all of your paperwork when you check in. In addition to that, you have to worry about injuries, flats, getting lost (whether by yourself or a taxi driver), assault, carelessness, stupidity. Just recently, in the first episode of the season, a team of two girls who were then in fourth place, got to a point where they had to do one of two tasks. One task was to play beach volleyball against professional volleyball players and score six points before the professionals did. In addition to this, they could use their hands. These girls only scored 2 points before they decided that it was too hard and they switched to the other task. That task was to complete a slide puzzle which matched the sidewalk design that was running along the beach. These girls slipped from fourth to last place and were eliminated because they could not figure out the puzzle while all of the other teams did that task or the volleyball one.

Survivor also has its favorites and let us look at Rupert Boneham, for example. I loved him at first but by his fourth time at the rodeo I was sick of him. Now did Rupert ever win a game? No. Did Rupert ever come in the top two or three survivors in their season? No. Yet, after his second appearance in the show on All Stars, he was made a millionaire by fan vote in a special show that was aired several days after the finale and reunion entitled America's Tribal Council. The first fan favorite award ever, just for Rupert, the colorful favorite of Burnett and Probst, to win.

http://survivor.wikia.com/wiki/Fan_Favorite_Award

Now let us look at Boston Rob, a special case, because he and Amber have been on both Survivor and the Amazing Race. Rob has been on Survivor four times. That's four chances at a million dollars, of which the very last time, he did win a million dollars. Here is the consensus on his final time on the show, where he won the million, as taken from Wikipedia:

"The season was universally panned by fans and critics alike, with many critics and fan polls repeatedly ranking it as the worst season of the series, the primary criticisms are that Redemption Island itself ruined the drama and significance of the elimination, that the cast as a whole was boring and unlikable, and that once Russell Hantz was eliminated, the competition became unfairly favorable to Rob Mariano. Survivor columnist of Entertainment Weekly Dalton Ross ranked it as the 9th-worst season, stating that "the fuse blew out" after the first three episodes, and also that "Most of the vote-offs were clearly telegraphed and the Redemption Island twist sucked the life out of the signature moment - the vote-off." Survivor: Tocantins runner-up and People's Survivor columnist Stephen Fishbach stated that he thought it was the worst season ever. In 2013, Andrea Reiher of Zap2it ranked it as the worst season of Survivor, saying "this season continually felt like one big 'let's win Boston Rob the Survivor title' game orchestrated by the producers for three months," and also criticized the Ometepe tribe as "a tribe full of gomers who were too star-struck to act against [Rob]," which "became more and more boring." In 2014, Joe Reid of The Wire ranked Redemption Island as the worst season of the series, similarly noting that "The coronation of Boston Rob was a foregone conclusion from the earliest stages...The whole season had an air of uselessness around it, and we'd have all been better off if CBS had just aired a 30-minute special where Les Moonves wrote Mariano a check." Reid also described the entire new cast as being "full of lemmings and idiots." Since 2012, Survivor fan site "Survivor Oz" has consistently ranked Redemption Island as the worst season ever in its annual polls ranking every season of the series. It was also ranked as the worst season of all time in 2015 on former Survivor contestant and reality TV podcast host Rob Cesternino's website, both by Cesternino himself and by the fan poll. Fellow Survivor fan site "The Purple Rock Podcast" ranked Redemption Island as the 7th-worst season in 2015, describing it as "generally boring and predictable television."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor:_Redemption_Island

Rob and Amber did very well on their first time on the Amazing Race, coming in second. In fact, on a featurette on the dvd, Rob, Phil Keoghan, and Unchenna (the winner) deny any production intervention as to the final outcome:

"Controversy surrounded the final leg of the race: when Rob & Amber and Uchenna & Joyce arrived at the airport in San Juan, they were both sold tickets for a flight leaving later than one whose gate was about to close. While Rob & Amber managed to get on this earlier departing flight, Uchenna & Joyce were shown through the gate as the boarding corridor between the gate exitway and airplane began to shut. After a commercial break, the boarding corridor reopened to the gate to pick up Uchenna and Joyce. No explanation was given as to why the gate reopened, which has led to widespread speculation about intervention by the production staff. In the "Revisiting the Race" special feature on the Season 7 DVD, Uchenna, Rob, and Host Phil Keoghan deny the accusations of intervention by the production crew. Uchenna describes his experience with finding the same airline agent at the gate who had previously informed him that there was no earlier available flight. Rob describes Uchenna running around frantically trying to get onto the flight, which the final edited version of the show does not portray. Phil cites the fact that the decision to reopen the door rested solely with the pilot, and that intervention by the production crew would have resulted in someone leaking such information out."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Race_7

The only manipulation appears with the editing done in the editing room. Perhaps they ran out of time when editing the footage for the timeslot. I suppose they could've taken something out from the show to have shown that little part on the televised program. The second time they appeared they were out at fourth place. That was in 2007. Last time Rob or Amber have been on a CBS reality show, 6 times in total by CBS for him to win a million. Four times on Survivor and two times on the Amazing Race.

 

Is this an Amazing Race thread?

 

I love Survivor. I have watched every episode or rather DVRed every one. I agree about Abi and if I were there with her, would make it KNOWN that she's the first one out, cannot even stand to hear her speak, it's annoying as hell. I didn't care about Vytas either. I was surprised that he was the first gone and I have to keep hearing Abi run her mouth. Haven't watched the 2nd episode yet, I will today.

And I agree with what Texastoyz posted and I said it before. They should have gave Boston Rob a million dollars to NOT play in the game again. I mean, how many chances do you get lol? It's obvious that he failed but Jeff had a hard on for him and yet another Survivor All Stars with Rob! Stupid if you ask me. And that brings me to another point? Why does Survivor do this in the first place? It's more interesting when it's fresh faces in the crowd and not someone who has played the game just last season or 3 other times! I don't get it. Like for example Joe who just played last season. I liked Joe and if this were a REAL Survival game he would have won hands down. The others on that show couldn't survive alone if you gave them a steak dinner every night. But Joe just played and so did that irksome redhead with the glasses (who the hell voted her back on anyway?).

And that brings me to another point. They need to revamp how they do Survivor to weed out people who have no freaking clue how to survive on their own. Like for the first 10 days separate every one. Make them build their own shelter, make their own fire, let's see how long these clueless dummie's would last.

 

That's what I've always said about the show, and how it has gotten so far away from the original "surviving" aspects of the original seasons. They make it way too easy for people with zero survival skills to coast through. Too many luxury items provided, food rewards, food handed out to everyone day one. People lose some weight along the way but don't get skinny like the first few years.

It's a rarity now to have someone like Joe, or Ozzy, or Wigglesworth that could get by just fine being dumped in those locations by themselves. These players that can't survive on their own, or have any "roughing it" abilities should have to suffer much more than they do for not being prepared to survive in jungle conditions. Instead the show has morphed to be able to have bimbos treat it like a summer camp sunning and playing in the seas while all their necessities are handed to them. I think it makes for a much better show when there are adversity and hardship to overcome besides just who gets along best with who.

Think of it this way--the strategy always is now to get out the strongest, most threatening players early. What if the survival aspect was notched back up, and if those people were gone early all the people who have no skills would be left starving and freezing with no fire? It would totally change the dynamic and strategy of the game, for the better in my opinion.

 

That gets my vote!

 

If anyone's getting the "winner's edit" it must be Jeff Varner.

 

Shirin made the classic mistake of taking the bottom of her alliance for granted. Anyone who knows anything about this show should know that you have to constantly keep everyone in your alliance in good graces...especially someone as fragile and needy as Abi. Good for Terry. He pulled off the strip, sack and return for a td.

 

That's a great analysis! Thanks!