Whether you watch it or not, you've likely heard of Survivor. For 25 years now, millions of people have been tuning in to the reality TV show where players voluntarily get stranded in a remote landscape, battling for food and supplies, competing in physical and mental challenges, voting each other off … duking it out for the title of "Sole Survivor" and a chance to win 1 million dollars.
For me, and the rest of the show's passionate fan base, it's much more than just reality TV.
I first got into Survivor during the pandemic when I was looking for something to binge-watch. I saw it while scrolling through my options, which reminded me of how badly my friend Tyler Pincus wanted me to watch the show. He's the true embodiment of a superfan — not only has he seen every season, he's watched some of them more than five times.
"Survivor is like 75% of my personality," Pincus told me. "It's just a perfect combination of everything. You have funny moments, touching moments. You have strategy, you have physical competitions. People talk about how it's a microcosm of society and how it's the ultimate social experiment — and it really is."
I was hooked almost immediately, and got my other friends hooked, too. We started watching old seasons at the same time and holding watch parties for the current seasons.
Okay, if you're not a fan of the show, here's the gist: players compete in challenges for immunity, which saves them from being voted out that round. Players get voted out one by one until only a few remain.
To not get voted out, yes, you have to win challenges but you also have to build alliances, have good social strategy and be willing to be cutthroat. That's the motto of the game: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. At the end, the finalists argue their case to a jury of eliminated players as to why they think they played the best game. The jury then votes for the "Sole Survivor" — winner of the season.
In 2022, we decided we wanted to put that ultimate social experiment to the test and recreate the game for ourselves. We spent a day in Malcolm X Park in Washington, D.C. split into tribes, playing games from the show, doing tribal councils, scheming and voting each other out until we ended with a winner.
And we've leveled up every year since — bigger groups, three day weekends, traveling to different locations, with folks from all over the country flying in. There are friends that have known each other for 10 years, given speeches at each other's weddings, and there are people meeting each other for the first time. Some are superfans, and others haven't even watched a full season.
The friends not keen on competing become our valiant team of producers — recording content and posting updates live for our loyal Instagram fanbase (almost 200 followers).
Each year, two new players take their turn at running the game — they're our Jeff Probst, the longtime Survivor host. "The Jeffs" spend the year planning out the challenges and sick new twists. They also deal with all the logistics — like how many hard seltzers a group of 20 might go through in a few days.
This past Memorial Day weekend, we had our fourth annual games, this time in Collegeville, Pa. My best friends from college, Anna Wickham and Care Shoaibi, were our Jeff Probsts.
Wickham says, over the past year, she's probably spent 200 hours planning.
"But if I'm talking [hours] I was lying awake at night thinking of a twist or a new advantage or something that our friends had never seen before, I mean I don't want to say four figures, but it's a lot. This has been pretty consuming in really the happiest, best way for me."
Together, the two of them planned a gauntlet of challenges — some harkening back to Survivor favorites, and some cooked up in their evil minds. This year, they decided to resurface a particularly scarring challenge from last year's game — Crisco Watermelon. Picture one watermelon in the middle of the field, with all players covered in Crisco. They then have to wrestle each other to be the last one holding the watermelon (also covered in Crisco, by the way) when time is up.
We strategize, we blindside each other, we build and break alliances, we brutally vote each other off for the chance to win zero dollars and a year's bragging rights.
It's frankly the most anxiety-inducing weekend of the year, with every waking and sleeping moment spent worrying that your allies are lying to you and that you'll be out next. The only time I'm not thinking about getting blindsided is when I'm fighting for my life trying to do a "swim pacer test" where players had to swim back and forth at faster and faster speeds (I dropped out almost immediately, I know my strengths).
Sometimes, though, my strategy doesn't work out. Like this year, when I played an immunity idol for myself — an object that cancels out any votes cast against you — only to very publicly be told it was not a real immunity idol. I was swiftly and humiliatingly voted out.
Still, this weekend is the highlight of my year, every year. I don't get to see a lot of these friends that often, and I love that a shared love of "committing to a bit" can bring us together like this.
And it's funny to think about how Tyler Pincus's borderline concerning love of Survivor started it all:
"I'm just honored to be a part of this thing," he told me.
"And it's the best thing in my life."
After we're all packed up and ready to leave Collegeville, there's one last thing to do. Wickham and Shoaibi sign their Jeff Probst hats and pass the torch to the two new Jeffs for next year. I'm told planning for our Survivor Season 5 is already aggressively underway.
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