How Jeff Probst is Ruining the Reunion Show

I’ve had this idea for a post for a while now and it is time that I finally write and publish it. You see, it should be apparent right now to everyone that Jeff Probst is ruining the reunion show. We’ve seen this ever since Caramoan, if not sooner. It’s like he doesn’t want Rosie O'Donnell to be remembered as the worst host of a reunion show.

Basically, Jeff and his Jeffness are causing issues and irritations among Survivor fans. It’s like he wants us to be glad if he winds up gone as host for whatever reason. But the reunion show, once considered the way the show should end each season, now winds up constantly ruined due to his involvement.

This actually started at least back in Redemption Island. After a whole season that was about Boston Rob, it did not help the reputation of how easy he had it as a winner to basically make the entire reunion show effectively the Boston Rob show. We already saw a whole season of Rob running circles around a bunch of noobs who were too glorified by him that they couldn’t take out him as a threat. Did we really need yet another hour of a reunion show about that?

And that’s back in the good old days when the reunion show was the whole hour it was supposed to be. We see a lot of Jeff talking with any of the finale vote outs of those that he feel deserve time that they could have easily gotten at the reunion show. These prereunion segments have always been awful and always took away from the time supposed to go to the real reunion show. There are other reasons why the reunion show isn’t a full hour. Plus, I don’t know how much the editors are to blame or if Jeff is even involved in the editing process.

But the worst of these prereunion segments had to be in Edge of Extinction when Joe was the only one of those players who lost that talked to Jeff. Jeff had to talk to his favorite alpha male of recent seasons whose strength is overshadowed by his lack of awareness of how not to stand out as a threat or to even be on the right side of the numbers of votes. Jeff is the sole reason that these prereunion segments exist. They need to go forever.

It is hard not to think of reunion shows as better in earlier seasons and ruined constantly in these seasons. We haven’t even a live reunion show since Edge of Extinction, but a good reunion show was a much earlier time ago than that. If the winner glorification of Rob in Redemption Island was bad enough, we had the winner justification of Ben in Heroes versus Healers versus Hustlers. Very little of what we saw in the reunion show was about something other than why Ben deserved to win after the new twist that is now forced upon us from season to season every season after it.

When Winners at War didn’t even have a reunion show, it was actually a welcome change. One might think that just ending the season with just a winner reveal could be a good way to end it, even if it meant not hearing from the contestants again at the end.

Of course, if there isn’t a reunion show, then we shouldn’t have something like the after show that we saw end 41. It might have been a fine way to end it, if the people voted out before the jury were there and got to enjoy it just like the players at a reunion show does. This new format can only be blamed just a bit on the pandemic and not knowing how it would happen. It can entirely be blamed on Jeff.

Jeff seems to only listen to the fans at times when there is too much overwhelming negativity to just overcome his support of this. Heck, I deleted three posts of this very blog you are reading because of intense backlash to it. But there are issues that he seems fine ignoring like the new way of doing the final four. It is possible that people don’t know just how much people hate his influence of the reunion show. He might know if this post gets back to him. I won’t tweet it to him directly like a hater would. I would hope that he can learn from his ways and bring us better Survivor.

He probably just ignores or would get irritated at any negativity as one would. I don’t bother reading things that I know will piss me off. But sometimes, people need to learn how to make things better. And if Jeff is going to remain as involved as he is with the show, he shouldn’t keep messing up the reunion show. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.