I’m not surprised to hear Survivor has a larger crew now, heading into Season 51, than it did decades ago when it first became a cultural phenomenon. Viewers get to see conversations and challenges from multiple angles. There are rarely plot-relevant happenings that the cameras don’t catch. These big steps forward in production obviously require manpower, but even still, I’m rattled by the actual breakdown in numbers.
Longtime host and showrunner Jeff Probst sat for an interview with The Ankler, and during the conversation, he was asked about the challenges of shooting the first season. He said it was exhilarating to be on the ground and trying to figure it all out in real time, but he admitted the conditions were a lot harsher and required everyone to pull double duty.
Everyone on set carried tripods, cameras and pieces of equipment. If they needed to get somewhere, they were all walking, sometimes an hour and a half or more to get to where they were going. By the end of production, the crew only had one boat left because the other four were destroyed in a storm. They were all roughing it, and the “they” at the time was only eighty-five total people.
We all lived in tents, very small single person tents. To give you a little perspective, our crew was about eight-five people. Today, with our entire international crew and all the Fijians, we’re around seven or eight hundred, plus boat drivers and even more. So, we were small.
Most popular shows add more manpower in subsequent seasons. Producers naturally want to use the resources at their disposal, and that usually means a larger crew so that everyone isn’t pulling double duty. That usually means more elaborate and complicated shots that require more time-consuming set-ups and more seasoned professionals. All of that is normal, but going from eighty-five to eight hundred is still shocking.
Survivor fans complain a lot about the show reducing the game from thirty-nine days to twenty-six days. We’re obviously not privy to the conversations between the show and CBS, but we do know Probst and the producers kept the shorter format post-Covid at least in part because they didn’t want to make sacrifices in production quality. I think that likely has a lot to do with crew size. They don’t want to end up in a situation where the new seasons look worse or capture less than what fans are used to.
Whether that’s the right choice or not, Survivor looks great. There’s no denying how fantastic the production values are. It is jarring to watch the early seasons of the show and compare it to what we’re seeing now. Some of that is obviously related to technology, but a really healthy portion is also related to how many resources are put into the camera work, the set design and the schedule to make sure every moment is being filmed as cinematically (and covertly) as possible.
You can check out Survivor 51 and see where all those production resources go when it returns to the TV schedule on September 23rd. It'll air live on CBS and also be available on Paramount+.
