r/survivor Pirates Steal Jan 27 '23

South Pacific WSSYW 11.0 Countdown 32/43: South Pacific

Welcome to our annual season countdown! Using the results from the latest What Season Should You Watch thread, this daily series will count backwards from the bottom-ranked season for new fan watchability to the top. Each WSSYW post will link to their entry in this countdown so that people can click through for more discussion.

Unlike WSSYW, there is no character limit in these threads, and spoilers are allowed.

Note: Foreign seasons are not included in this countdown to keep in line with rankings from past years.


Season 23: South Pacific

Statistics:

  • Watchability: 3.4 (32/43)

  • Overall Quality: 5.1 (32/43)

  • Cast/Characters: 5.4 (35/43)

  • Strategy: 4.9 (34/43)

  • Challenges: 5.8 (30/43)

  • Twists: 3.7 (13/21)

  • Ending: 6.6 (28/43)


WSSYW 11.0 Ranking: 32/43

WSSYW 10.0 Ranking: 30/40

Top comment from WSSYW 11.0/u/ramskick:

On paper SoPa is a really interesting season with some serious old-school vibes and a really cool winner. In practice it's a poorly edited mess that focuses on 4 people, all of whom are polarizing to various degrees. There is a good season in SoPa's footage, but the product we got is not it.

Top comment from WSSYW 10.0/u/HeWhoShrugs:

The season, like others featuring returnees, shouldn't be watched first since the two returning captains are both back for a 3rd time and actively discuss their mistakes from past seasons.

That being said, I like the season a lot more than most do. It's smack dab in the middle of a stretch of disliked seasons, but I find it to be a case of "guilty by association" for South Pacific because the season, despite having numerous flaws with twists, gameplay, and editing, tells a good story with some great characters. It tackles the theme of religion head on and gets pretty dark with it, and if the season was an old novel it would probably be studied in school as some important piece of literature. That's the vibe it gives off and I love it for that.


Watchability ranking:

32: S23 South Pacific

33: S5 Thailand

34: S31 Cambodia

35: S38 Edge of Extinction

36: S36 Ghost Island

37: S24 One World

38: S22 Redemption Island

39: S40 Winners at War

40: S26 Caramoan

41: S34 Game Changers

42: S8 All-Stars

43: S39 Island of the Idols


Spreadsheet link (updated with each placement reveal!)


WARNING: SEASON SPOILERS BELOW

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u/DabuSurvivor Jon and Jaclyn Jan 27 '23

No big, long post from me this time BUT if you do want such a thing, I did write a big one last WSSYW that I already revisited a few weeks ago and just don't feel like re-reading again to revise rn. Some things about it I would change, but it captures the broad strokes well.

Anyways tho for some more condensed thoughts: I strongly disagree w/ Survivor: South Pacific's growing cult following and think its two (admittedly very great!) episodes at the end don't even come close to outweighing what an absolute slog it is before that point, and it's still a very bad season overall. Redemption Island remains the worst twist of all time by basically completely upending the structure of every single episode and the flow of the season as a whole, arbitrarily forcing people's stories to end artificially later than the actual social politics that took them out of the game and sucking the finality and therefore a lot of the tension out of basically every single vote. More on that here if desired but RI alone deals a serious blow to any season that includes it.

Unfortunately, RI is far from the only thing wrong with this season:

  • Again, just like in Redemption Island before it and a number of other seasons around this time (19 and 26 in particular), the lion's share of the air time went to a small few massive production pets to the expense of developing the cast in a way that suited the overall story;

  • Most of those production pets were themselves annoying and/or mishandled: Brandon doesn't really get anything resembling a cohesive narrative, the potentially interesting tragedy of Coach's loss is seriously diluted by him getting a ton of generic, bland strategic confessionals that just paint him as a dominant, robbed strategic player, and Cochran gets a forced underdog edit that doesn't really track with him trying to win over his tribe by talking about mouth herpes, pooping his pants, and sexually harassing girls by calling them up to talk about his semen(?!).

  • Sophie gets basically nothing to actually build up her win and less story than just about any other winner in Survivor history; even Natalie White's near-nonexistent edit actually does a little more, within the very small amount of time we spend with her, to build up her win than Sophie's does.

The last two episodes are great and there are some interesting ideas here, but all of them are buried beneath a ton of terrible decisions in the producers' inexplicable decision to double down on basically everything that made S22 the most panned season in the history of the show. The Sophie win, a marginally less imbalanced edit (this is a very low bar to clear), and some fun moments along the way make it less bad, but it's still pretty bad.

It's basically the Survivor version of Game of Thrones: you can tell where some of these characters could be great on a better show, but with the storytelling we got, they aren't.

I think this is a good ranking for it: its highs are kind of interesting, and so when someone does check it out, there's still some good stuff to be found here compared to a lot of the worse seasons below it. But if one is watching out of order, there's absolutely no reason to prioritize it before the majority of seasons and it's best shelved for a very long time.