Survivor Fans Obsessed With Tracking The Edit Are Arguing About Cirie And Two Others

There are different levels to Survivor fandom, and the closer you move to the top, the more obsessed people tend to be with the edit. You might not even know this if you’re not in the deep end with me and the other crazies, but there are multiple weekly podcasts that use confessional counts, screentime and the perceived tone the show is giving players to predict who is most and least likely to win the game. Most of them literally rank every player every single week. Usually the different analysts more or less agree with each other, but 50 is all over the island on a few players including Cirie Fields.

Whether the analysts are giving full so-called Edgic ratings or not, the most important metric they typically look at is confessional count. The person with the most isn’t necessarily going to get the most votes at the end, but the theory is that Survivor is telling a story every season and is going to want its winner to be a consistent part of that story. They shouldn’t be the main character every single week, but at some level, we should always know who they’re working with and how their journey is going.

Survivor has more or less followed this editing strategy throughout its run, but it’s been particularly pronounced the last five years because fans were very loud and very critical about how 41 was edited (and not just because of that horrible twist). The winner had three entire episodes without a single confessional and finished with twelve less than the person who finished eighth. Since then, every single Survivor winner has had at least one confessional in every single episode of the season. Four of the last five winners got at least two confessionals every single episode, and the only exception in 47 got at least three confessionals in eleven of the fourteen episodes.

And that brings us to Survivor 50, which features a shocking number of players that have gone a full episode without a confessional. Eight of the remaining nineteen from the incredible cast, in fact, got skunked during at least one episode. Some of them like Kamilla, Angelina and Tiffany have been underedited in most episodes and/ or presented somewhat negatively and are widely considered to be non-viable winners by all the major Survivor analysts. There’s a little more disagreement around Stephenie and Chrissy as to whether they’re still in play, with some in particular thinking Chrissy is a fun darkhorse.

The other three with a zero vote episode, however, are currently the subject of major disagreements. Cirie, Rick Devens and Jonathan Young have all been presented very positively and/ or gotten steady screentime outside of the much-discussed Zac Brown episode. Devens is fifth among all the remaining players in confessionals and has largely gotten a really fun and schemy edit.

Cirie is, of course, an all-time legend and is tied for seventh in confessionals. We’ve seen conversations with other players talking about her as a threat, and the show has gone out of its way to show how good she is at manipulating people. I’m not saying it’s the best edit she’s ever gotten, but without the zero vote episode, she would be looking really good.

The same could be said for Jonathan. He hasn’t been to Tribal Council a single time, and yet, we’re consistently getting information on who he’s working with and how he’s seeing the game. After the first two episodes, a lot of people started citing him as a possible winner based on how he was being presented, and yet, he got skunked out of nowhere in episode four.

There are some experts who are saying we should stop fixating on the whole zero confessional thing. Cirie, Jonathan and Rick’s tribe was barely shown during the last episode because they didn’t win the reward or go to tribal, and besides, on a season with twenty-four players, it’s perhaps not that big of a crime to go one episode without a confessional. Then again, there are others who are convinced a zero vote episode is a death sentence and you can basically write off anyone who goes without.

I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t think getting zero confessionals is a good sign, but I also don’t think it means they can’t possibly win the game. I’m going to weigh that in proportion to everything else I’m seeing. In my mind, that means Rick and Jonathan are very much still good candidates to win, Cirie is within the realm of possibilities and Chrissy and Stephenie are longshots that shouldn’t be written off. To my great sadness, I don’t really see a path forward for Tiffany, Angelina or Kamilla, but odder things have happened, as we found out in Survivor 41.

You can catch new episodes of Survivor 50 on Wednesday evenings. The first three rounds were very well received by fans. The last one was not. Hopefully tonight gets us back on track.