When Does Survivor Return?

Wednesday, December 27th will be the first Wednesday without a new episode of Survivor in quite a while. The iconic reality competition series has been airing 90-minute episodes every week since late September, culminating in a three-hour Season 45 finale last week that crowned Dee Valladares the franchise's newest Sole Survivor. While the season may have come to a close, the finale ended with host and producer Jeff Probst revealing a short teaser for the upcoming Survivor 46? So how long will it be before Survivor is back on the air?

Survivor Season 46 Premiere Date

Survivor has already been renewed for Season 46, which will once again be a non-themed installment, keeping in line with the last five seasons. Not only as the show been renewed, but Season 46 has already been filmed in Fiji, which means the wait for new episodes to premiere won't be very long.

CBS has announced that Survivor 46 will premiere on February 28, 2024. Like Season 45, Season 46 will be filled with super-sized episodes. Most of the episodes in the new season will be 90 minutes, but the first two episodes will actually be two hours long.

Survivor Recently "Retired" Popular Puzzles

Heading into Survivor 45, Probst and the production team decided to retire a couple of puzzles that fans had gotten used to seeing on the show. It's not that people were sick of them, but that contestants had found a way to get ahead of the curve. Season 44's Carson Garrett famously solved a puzzle very quickly and admitted on the show that he had 3-D printed a small version of that very same puzzle at home. He practiced several puzzles this way before heading out to Fiji.

"The backstory is we had been aware for years that players were making 3-D puzzles, because we would see it in their audition videos," Probst told EW. "And we jokingly anticipated that one season things are going to line up and a player was going to end up on the show who actually made a 3-D puzzle and that same puzzle will be in the season."

"When it happened, we really liked it," he continued, "because it felt like it was a bit of a reward to the superman, and we appreciated the meta moment of something like that."

It was a great moment for Probst to see Garrett win the challenge because of his dedicated fandom, but it's definitely not something he wants to see become a regular element of the game. If memorization replaces strategy and gameplay, it's not nearly as fun. So changes are being made, and even more could be made in the future.

"We understand that the idea can run its course and we feel like it has. So we did retire some puzzles, and we have new puzzles in Season 45, so I think it's unlikely that we will find ourselves in that spot again simply because we aren't looking for it anymore."