Connor Buchko
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90-Minute Episodes are Saving Survivor

2023-11-02

The castaways of Survivor 45 have officially merged and this season has been fantastic. The characters are dynamic, the edit is incredibly balanced, and we are getting vintage Survivor. And of course we have the 90-minute episodes to thank for this. The additional runtime makes a mind-boggling difference, it's a literal game changer. I want to quickly gush about this, catch up on how the seasons been shaping, and take a look at some of my predictions.

I'm a fan of the new era. All Survivor is good Survivor, and the new era has been at least average Survivor consistently. My main problems are the "distractions", ie. the journeys, the convoluted advantages and the board game twists. These are here to stay, and I'm okay with that. But with 90-minutes the edit can finally squeeze in what I would consider "real" Survivor. Camp life, silly discussions about Pokemon, Dee talking about her big toe. The social experiment can finally show the social part again.

The episodes just feel so much better paced. The new era sometimes feels like a whiplash of

  1. Idol Hunt
  2. Journey
  3. Immunity Challenge
  4. Pre-tribal scramble
  5. Tribal Council

and that could be an entire one-hour episode. That's not very fun. But now we still get all those things, plus a couple of filler scenes to let the show breathe in between. The filler is my favourite, I love the filler. Can we have 5 minutes of Katurah complaining about Bruce? We can with 90-minute episodes? Okay, I'm sold. Survivor 45 will probably go down as the best new era season solely because of this.

We had a really fun pre-merge. The Lulu collapse was low key hilarious. Having two quitters is frustratingly iconic. Brandon was a trainwreck. And Sabiyah went home in a supremely flashy way. Brando's episode was the only uneventful one, but even then we got a fun new era tribe swap. I would have liked to seen the OG Belo dynamics shake out, but watching Kaleb navigate Lulu was a masterclass.

In terms of winner predictions, there's a few people who I see having a shot. From Reba I have Austin and Dee. From Lulu I think Kaleb and Emily both have a shot. Finally, from Belo I could see either a Kellie or Jake win. So I guess two people from each OG tribe. Everyone else is pretty dead in the water, either game play wise or edit wise. Maybe Drew too? His edit is a little weird to me, doesn't really scream winner.

I got high hopes for the post-merge. So many people to root for, can't wait to see how it shakes out.