STOP RECRUITING NEW PLAYERS ALREADY! An Open Letter

While this is not being sent to anyone outside of being posted on this blog, I would thought that I’d do a quick (possibly) post on the terrible problem of Survivor casting: recruitment. Obviously, if these are returning players or all star seasons, then this isn’t worth addressing too much. It is when new players are recruited for the show instead of being applicants, there are issues with it.

Why applicants are better: you are going to get a ton of people who are interested in the show if you do applicants. Recruits may not care that much about the very thing that they are doing. Applicants might be seen in better light by fans if they are better players. I mean, we shouldn’t be able to have those who admit to being recruited always be the more controversial players.

There are a lot of various flaws with the recruitment of new players and it can be maddening. I am sure that a lot of people still apply to the show. Indeed, there have to be enough applicants to make up a whole season because there has to be more than 20 each season. Surely applicants are still being done even now during a long hiatus of Survivor.

Ultimately, the failure of recruits should be known best by Survivor: Fiji. While I’m sure that it has its fans, I don’t like it and feel that it had the weakest casts of all of the seasons (outside of any of them that are facebook friends of mine ;-) because they are good). The fact that all but one of the contestants that season were recruited might be one of the reasons why. Am I lead to believe that it is a coincidence that this happened? While there were other reasons that the season sucked, it would be hard for them to do much good with a season full of recruits who never saw the show before.

This leads to the biggest issue that I have with recruits that I might be willing to overlook and get rid of all of my hatred of them. If the casting department on this show is going to recruit people to be on this show, then they should at least recruit fans of the show. There is no reason why someone who has never seen the show should be on the show. You are screwing devoted fans by not putting those who are doing the hard work of applying for the show on the show and instead putting people on the show who have no idea what the show is even like.

You might have to wonder, then, what if Survivor producers read this blog of mine, track me down, and want to put me on the show, without me ever having applied to be on it? Honestly, I don’t think that I would say no. But I don’t even know if I should be on Survivor or not. I don’t want my thoughts on this show to be tainted by playing it and finding out that I’m just better off watching it. Besides, if I want to work for Survivor, I’d rather be a creative consultant than a contestant.

And that’s all that I have time for in regards to this post and the rest of the month of this blog. I wish that I could have gotten a post done on another Survivor episode, but this will not be the case. I doubt that you will see one again until January. We’ll see what Survivor seasons I might get on DVD as a gift for Christmas. Maybe Cagayan or All-Stars? I won’t need any for a while, but still want some. I got another one as I will talk about in probably two blog posts as you’ll see it in place of one of the current ones. I wish that I had more time for things this week and the rest of this month, but it won’t happen. I just wish that I could have shared another calendar of planned posts. But you’ll figure things out at one point or another. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.