'Survivor 50' Producers Reveal Last-Minute Tribe Swap Before Filming: 'There's Something Off' (Exclusive)
As 24 of the most iconic players in Survivor history hit the beach for tonight’s three-hour premiere, they are walking into a game that was actually reshuffled at the eleventh hour. According to executive producer Matt Van Wagenen, the three tribes viewers see on screen tonight were not the original plan.
"There was one—I won’t say who—but there was one last-minute change," Van Wagenen, who's been with the show since Season 14, exclusively told Men's Journal on set in Fiji. "We were like, ‘It’s not feeling right. There’s something off.’ And then someone went, ‘Well, what if we just did this?’ So there were two people we switched."
The decision to shuffle the deck just before the marooning was a result of months of thoughtful planning met with the reality of a stacked cast of fan-favorite players. Van Wagenen and host Jeff Probst spend the off-season looking at the "tapestry" of the cast, trying to balance different eras of the show.
For Season 50, that meant finding the right mix of "New Era" strategists and "Mount Rushmore" legends. "Once we had all the cards laid out, it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is good,’" Van Wagenen says. "There’s representation of different types of people and eras. And it felt right."
The shuffle resulted in some very interesting pairings as fans will see the self-described dragonslayer Benjamin "Coach" Wade sharing a camp on the Kalo tribe with The White Lotus creator Mike White, among others.
Some fans seem to be expecting a New Era vs. Old School battle, but the producers purposefully wanted to avoid that narrative. "We didn't want this to be [that]," Van Wagenen explains. "I want to see Jenna Lewis-Dougherty and Savannah Louie playing together—bookending it. It’s the mix, all the flavors of Survivor mixed up together, that I’m excited to see."
And while fans may not find out which two players were ultimately swapped, the impact of that decision will surely affect the game. "I’ll be curious to see how that turns out," Van Wagenen says.
Survivor 50 premieres on CBS tonight, Feb. 25 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.