With Survivor 46, and filming completed for Survivor 47, the iconic reality series is rapidly approaching its monumental 50th season on CBS. The series went all out for its 40th installment, dubbing it Winners at War and offering a whopping $2 million prize to a cast comprised completely of previous Survivor winners (Survivor: Cagayan took the prize to become the show’s second repeat victor). With the stakes already raised for Survivor 40, Jeff Probst and the folks at CBS have their work cut out for them to try and up the ante for the landmark 50th season.
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How do you do better than a season filled with 20 previous winners? Well, we don’t know the answer to that question just yet. Probst confirmed recently that Survivor 50 will be the first season featuring returning players since Winners at War, making this 10-season stretch between returnee seasons the longest in the show’s history. It also appears that Survivor 50 will be a lengthy “celebration” at CBS.
While speaking at the Banff World Media Festival this week, CBS Entertain President Amy Reisenbach opened up to Deadline about the big plans in store for Survivor 50, which she confirmed will begin production next spring.
“We’re already talking about Season 50 for Survivor,” Reisenbach said. “We just wrapped up Season 47 in Fiji. I was texting with Jeff [Probst] last night and he said there’s some pretty epic blindsides coming up. I think this show can go on for a really long time.”
She added, “We will absolutely be celebrating and I would consider it kind of a year-long celebration. We do that really well on CBS. We will have a lot of plans in the works… it’d be the first time in the new era that will have returning players. That’s really exciting.”
Some Survivor fans may take the “year-long” comments to mean that Survivor 50 might be some kind of double season. The series currently airs new seasons in both the fall and spring, giving it two installments each year. Perhaps a season with a longer stay on the island and a bigger cast could end up spanning a full calendar year, but there’s no indication that that could be happening just yet.
Still, there will be a lot of questions about the length of Season 50, as Survivor trimmed its games from 39 days to just 26 days a few years ago. The move came after production resumed following the COVID-19 stoppages, but Probst and the production team have since fallen in love with the shorter format and schedule. The host and showrunner of the reality series said earlier this year that he has no plans to go back to the previous 39-day .
Perhaps he’d want to make an exception for Season 50?
