Since its premiere in 2000, the hit CBS reality game show “Survivor” has taken place across the globe, with each season set in an exotic island locale: Pulau Tiga in Malaysia, Ko Tarutao in Thailand, Efate in Vanuatu and many, many more.
But around a decade ago, the longtime host and executive producer Jeff Probst had an alarming realization. A growing population was making it harder to find remote islands without anybody on them. Extreme weather, including rising heat and more intense storms, was making it more dangerous to film. And burgeoning political unrest was making it more difficult to work with certain governments or in countries that no longer felt safe.
“When we started in 2000, there were lots of places in the world we could go,” Probst said last week in a phone interview. “But over the years, starting in about 2012, 2013, it became clear that we were running out of places to shoot.”
Both “Survivor” and its sister series, the globe-trotting adventure competition “The Amazing Race,” have been stalwart hits on CBS for nearly two decades. Both continue to draw sizable audiences: Last week’s Season 45 premiere of “Survivor” and Season 35 premiere of “The Amazing Race,” which screened back-to-back on Wednesday evening, were the most-streamed shows on Paramount+ that night, according to the network, with “Survivor” also topping NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” to win the night in broadcast ratings. But while the popularity of these shows has endured, producing them has continued to be a unique challenge — particularly as the world around them keeps changing.
“Our show is really a time capsule of 20-plus years of seeing the world grow,” said Elise Doganieri, one of the creators and executive producers of “The Amazing Race” alongside her husband, Bertram van Munster. “The Amazing Race” challenges teams of American contestants to chart sprawling international courses that take them from one far-flung locale to another, and many of the cities that appeared in the series when it debuted in 2001 have been transformed over the intervening years. “We go back to places that we’ve been to before, but the world has evolved and grown so much, and the landscape has really changed.”
Remote landscapes where the crew could shoot with little interference have since been built up, while locals in even the most out-of-the-way regions are more connected to the rest of the world. When “The Amazing Race” paid a visit to Dubai in the early 2000s, Doganieri remembered, the city was by and large still a sprawling desert landscape where “everything was old, with wooden boats and dhows.” Today, of course, “it’s the complete opposite: a futuristic ultramodern city.”
In some ways, Doganieri said, making a show like “The Amazing Race” has gotten easier over time: advancing camera and cellphone technology has streamlined aspects of the production, and location scouting, which used to be done using still photography, can now be done using video.
Other changes are more challenging. As with “Survivor,” climate change has begun to affect the way that “The Amazing Race” is made, with extreme heat and tropical storms sometimes interfering with the production. “Weather has made a big change in how we travel,” Doganieri said. “There’s more storms, especially over Asia, and we have flight delays and cancellations that push into the schedule.” Soaring temperatures in the summer have made filming the competition elements more demanding for both the contestants and crew. “We scouted in Asia for the first several episodes. It was hot when we scouted in April. When we filmed, it was 90, 95 degrees.”
Although Doganiei said production is prepared for when it’s “unbearably hot” with “electrolyte drinks, snacks, water, anything to keep hydration up,” she admits that “it’s tough” in the midst of more and more grueling summers. “Most of our show is shot outside, so it really does affect you,” she said. “You have to really be aware of it.”
“Survivor” solved its location problem by settling on one setting: the show has been set on the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji since its 33rd season. Earlier seasons were distinguished primarily by their location, with subtitles like “Survivor: Panama” and “Survivor: China” luring an audience in with the appeal of an intriguing new place. Shooting in Fiji again and again has removed that novelty, but Probst insists that it was a negligible feature to begin with. “It doesn’t really matter where you do it as long as it’s a real jungle,” he said.
“You don’t see Fiji,” said Drea Wheeler, a former contestant. “You’re just on an island. You’re miserable. It’s hot. It rains. It still sucks.”
“The real challenge,” said Rob Cesternino, a two-time “Survivor” contestant who competed in Panama and Brazil, “is keeping the show interesting with new ideas every season without changing locations.” In recent years, “Survivor” has tried to mix things up by devising overarching conceits, such as “David vs. Goliath,” in which “underdogs” compete against “overachievers,” and “Winners at War,” which featured the return of 10 previous “Survivor” victors. Although not all of these concepts have been considered successful, Probst said that he would “much rather the show burn out due to a bad idea than fade away due to boredom.”
Probst also said that filming in Fiji has freed the producers up to spend more time working on such ideas, simply because the static setting has “made everything more streamlined.” The show’s 300-person international crew, which also commands a vast infrastructure including 40 boats and a helicopter, now knows what to expect from the setting season over season, removing some of the environmental unpredictability that could make producing “Survivor” such a risky endeavor. The number of possible options for the production would only continue to dwindle as time went on and the climate continued to change. Nor could they easily reuse old locales after departing them.
“A lot of the places we visited in the past became popular because of ‘Survivor,’ and after we left they might have erected a resort on that island,” Probst said. “It was harder to find remote islands simply because there are more people on the planet. Storms were more intense, and there was no denying it — we had been out in these waters before and it was never like that. And it became less desirable to visit places where things were happening politically that made us feel unsafe, or that we didn’t want to be part of.” Given those considerations, sticking to Fiji just made sense.
“I think in many ways this was the answer to a problem that was always fast approaching,” he said.
That problem has continued to vex the producers of “The Amazing Race,” which still involves dozens of international settings per season. Shifting geopolitical concerns, a delicate matter for American productions abroad, have restricted the scope of where the crew can go, making it harder to find new and interesting places to shoot. “The world has gotten a little smaller,” said van Munster. “We’re not going to Russia right now. We’re not going to China. There are a lot of places in West Africa where I would love to go but where we can’t go. Senegal. Logistically, maybe we can figure it out. But is it safe? We don’t want to get ourselves in trouble in another country. The world is a tricky place.”
Nor is this the only way in which the world seems to be getting smaller. Phil Keoghan, the host of “The Amazing Race” since its inception, said in a recent video interview that people are more aware of the world around them than ever before — that globalization, in short, has changed the function of the show. “It used to be that we were almost opening up another universe for the audience, these unknown worlds that existed out there, these exotic places,” he said. “Some of that innocence has been lost. Now we’re watching Korean TV and Indian movies. We’re seeing the influence of the rest of world across social media. People who live in these places are sharing their homes with us in an intimate way.”
Part of the reason that “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race” have endured throughout these many changes is precisely because they are so good at capturing them. As fly on the wall, cinéma vérité exercises, they are not only contending with the realities of an ever-shifting world, but they are also documenting them. What’s evolving, in the environment and in the landscape, is evolving before the eyes of the audience. “The genre we operate in, we go with the flow, and whatever happens in front of the camera we go with it,” van Munster said.
“The world is changing so rapidly that what was fun 20 years ago is different fun 20 years later. But whatever it looks like, it’s always fascinating.”