Stephen Thompson

strategic kind of sophisticated game they're assessing all the game theory stuff and the alliances are shifting constantly but it's easy to follow it's good natured you don't have the kind of viciousness that i think undercuts the enjoyment of a lot of the earlier seasons it is one of my favorite kind of new era new school seasons of survivor

So my number two pick is season 31.

It is Survivor Cambodia Second Chance.

It is an all-star season, as the title suggests, but it is, I think, one of the best ways to do an all-star season, which is to specifically bring back players who have not won and who have not played three, four, five times the way some of these all-star seasons kind of keep bringing the same players back over and over and over again.

I think often with all-star players, all-star players are typically kind of their most interesting, their most hungry, and their most sophisticated as players in their second go-round.

And I think this season really demonstrates that.

I think also the structure of how they brought people back really proved beneficial in terms of who wound up on this cast.

They picked 32 former players who had never won the game.

threw it open to a fan poll.

And I know we were joking about how in the hands of the fans is always a bad idea.

But they had a fan poll where they whittled 32 people down to 20.

And what that largely did was weed out people Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor and executive producer of Survivor, thought were interesting that nobody actually wanted to see.

And so, no, we're not going to get Troy Zahn.

No, we're not going to get Brad Culpepper.

We're going to get actual fan favorites and people the audience was most excited to see back on the show.

There were a couple of kind of early players I would have liked to have seen in this cast, but largely had very few complaints about it.

And then you get a bunch of really hungry, aggressive, thoughtful players, a mix of people I really love and a couple of people I really don't love.

And just the way the game plays out,

winds up being enormously beneficial.

There is an episode of this show where one of my favorite players absolutely pantses one of my least favorite players in kind of spectacular fashion.