American IDOLS

A new round of Survivor brings back bad memories, writes George Fenwick

It’s all too easy while watching Survivor (or any competition show, for that matter) to shake our heads as a contestant makes a fatal mistake. They fail to play an idol. They trust the wrong person. They’re blindsided by a betrayal. “Poor guy,” we say, or perhaps less sympathetically, “silly them”.

But what if those fatal mistakes left a mark — and what if they came back to haunt the show?

On Survivor: Ghost Island, the 36th season of the original US series, the legends and lore of Survivor become part of the game. As the longest-running reality competition show on television, Survivor US faces the challenge of making each round as fresh and interesting as the last. For this season, which takes place on Fiji’s Mamanuca Islands, the producers went back in time.

“Ghost Island represents the graveyard of every bad Survivor decision,” says executive producer and host Jeff Probst. “If you’ve been a fan of Survivor, you can think back to the time when James was voted out with two idols, or when JT was voted out with an idol in his pocket, or when somebody gave an advantage to somebody and they were betrayed by them.

“Ghost Island is this idea that all of those bad decisions have been living and haunting Ghost Island for years, and now they’re ready to come back and haunt this group of players,” he says. “Every advantage and every idol that’s in the game will be an actual advantage or idol from a previous season that was misplayed. If you find an idol on the beach, it’s going to be an idol that has a bad history with it, and . . . it’s the actual idol.”

For Probst and his producers, that meant trawling through the past 35 seasons and