Jeff Probst Says ‘Survivor’ Needs to ‘Do Better’ at This New Addition to Season 47

The Tribe Has Spoken

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Jeff Probst and his team immediately didn’t like the ladder maze seen in Survivor Season 47 Episode 5. It was a new feature they added into a challenge defined by new, but it will likely be changed if and when it appears again.

The reward challenge had several never-before-seen elements, like the three tribes being split into two teams for one challenge only and the winning side sharing in the “Survivor Social” reward after. It also featured a ladder maze that made the two teams guide their ladders through a complicated apparatus and free it before it could be used for the next leg of the challenge. Probst revealed in the newest episode of the Survivor On Fire podcast that he and the show’s producers immediately regrouped on set after filming this challenge to brainstorm how this ladder maze could be improved, as the immediate reaction to seeing it in game play was that they can “do better.”

“The ladder maze was a puzzle in and of itself,” Probst said in On Fire (listen to the full episode below). “It served multiple purposes. You need the ladder in order to complete the challenge, but in order to free the ladder, you have to get it through this maze which becomes the puzzle. And that was the tricky part. Every time you add another layer to an element, it makes it more complex, but it still has to work.”

The show creators know a new challenge detail is working when the time put into making it and filming it is clearly worth it in post-production. The team knew immediately that they only did “OK” on this new feature.

A new challenge element “can’t go so fast that it’s not worth all the time it will take the art department to build it, but it can’t take too long that it slows the challenge down,” Probst explained. “And so you’re navigating that. I would say we did OK [with the ladder maze]. This was not an A for us, and as our process is after the challenge was over, we went right back to that spot literally as the tribes are still walking off.”

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“[Executive producer John] Kirhoffer and the team and me, we go right to that spot and say, OK, how do we improve this?” Probst continued. “And we came up with some ideas.”

Probst said that this ladder maze “is a really great reminder to our audience that we don’t always hit a home run. Sometimes things work better than you expected, and sometimes they don’t go as well as you wanted them to. This didn’t hurt us. It’s fine. The challenge is great, but if you wanted my real opinion, I’d say, yeah, we can do better and we will.”

The maze didn’t cause as much commotion as the knife and block puzzle elements did later on in the immunity challenge. Getting the sandbags and coconuts freed and knocking every block off of the platforms took much more time than the ladder maze. But the trickiest parts of the immunity challenge were ultimately more dramatic than the ladder puzzle.

What do you think about the new elements from the episode? Do you want to see the Survivor Social again? Let us know your thoughts about what Survivor should tweak in the comments section, below.

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