The Survivor online community has proven throughout the years that it is very important to them to preserve the history of the show. Whether through archiving episode recaps from different sites, talking about different seasons on forums like Survivor Sucks or Reddit, or supporting podcasts with the very mission of upholding the show’s relevance to history like the Survivor Historians. Through all these actions, there has always been one specific message: we care about the past.

Three icons and Mark Burnett.

As I just wrote about with the Chrissy biography conspiracy, it would seem like the show itself cares far less about its own history. Were production and CBS left to their own devices, we would remember a season for a year or two before moving it out of our brains to make room for more recent seasons. Rinse, lather, repeat until the end of time. It’s definitely a belief that a lot of fans hold about the producers and something that should be talked about.

Creatively, there is some concept for why the producers would prefer us not looking back. They work hard to create new seasons, with fresh twists, only for fans to point at the old days and prefer that instead. It’s probably frustrating to put in so much energy into something only to be told it was already done better more than a decade ago. For production, fans being stuck in the past means not being able to move forward in the present and nostalgia can be a great foe to their current success.

Of course not everything from the past is ignored. We still get a lot of call-backs to Borneo since it was the Genesis of this entire thing. Similarly, Australian Outback has had approximately 1500 people from its cast brought back to play again because it will forever be the most watched season of Survivor. In the lore of Survivor history, they represent the Alpha and the Omega. If you happen to be the theta like a Thailand, or the Marquesas rho, you get thrown aside.

Honestly, probably my favorite part of Game Changers is the media campaign leading up to its debut. With episode 500 being the season premiere, the powers that be got a bunch of people to reminisce on their Survivor experience. Of course, they rolled out the usual suspects like Boston Rob, Cirie Fields, Malcolm Freberg, and Tai Trang but they also got some less heralded contestants. We got to hear from Jessie Camacho, Jed Hilderbrand, and Matt Bischoff. Players that would never be remembered on the show in any other context.

It wasn’t always like this either. There used to be a lot more reverence given to the show’s past in current seasons. I would argue that up until All-Stars, a lot of the show’s history could be self-contained due to the love given by its creators. Then All-Stars’ storyline basically revolved around Rob destroying people’s prior legacies and it kind of put a damper on trying to remember the past. Boston Rob’s story isn’t nearly as effective if we don’t really care whose legacies he is sullying. When the fans remember that Rob Cesternino was a genius mastermind, or that Tina Wesson was one of the show’s savviest winners, it hurts a lot more to see them cut down so early.

Since All-Stars, it’s been a lot less common to have call-backs to the past. You have occasional challenges that work in some history like Palau’s reward that included Survivor: Trivia Pringles, or the challenge in Micronesia that involved questions about old seasons. Whenever he can, Jeff will bring up Rupert in challenges that involved strength like when J.T. matched the record set by Rupert, among others, in the carry the load challenge. Of course returning player seasons will also involve some packages from those older seasons but usually to the smallest possible extent.

For more evidence that the show is always going to have a bias for its more recent seasons, look at Cambodia, and the people who made the ballot for a second chance.

Keep in mind that in terms of chronology, Cambodia represents the 31st season of Survivor so in the producer’s mind, the same number of people from Worlds’ Apart deserve a second chance as much as the entire pool of contestants from seasons 1–9. They also deserve more of a chance than anybody from the 10–20 era of Survivor. They had multiple people from One World and Redemption Island on the ballot. Anytime you can get those guys a chance instead of Silas Gaithers or Helen Glover, apparently you just have to do it.

The thing too is that their efforts are working. Teresa Cooper, the T-Bird herself, ended up missing the cut for Cambodia. So too did Panama’s resident crazy person, Shane Powers. Those are two contestants on the ballot that should have been absolute mortal locks to make it onto the season. Neither of them made it because many fans either never saw their season, or didn’t remember them, and the show didn’t make any extra efforts to help them remember.

Not only do we have to worry about the older seasons being faded away into obscurity for the masses, we have to worry about how the history of Survivor itself is presented. Because they make the show, production chooses how to interpret the past. So if production wants to influence us in remembering Parvati as the best of all-time, they can easily do that. Remember Russell Hantz? He may not have won but according to many people, he saved Survivor somehow. Samoa got lower ratings than every season before it and was surpassed by Heroes vs Villains, Nicaragua, Redemption Island, and South Pacific but ask production and Russell was the show’s savior. The show is dealing with its own confirmation bias when it comes to its past, whether they realize it or not.

It’s the little things really. Just recently on Millennials vs Gen X, why couldn’t they have taken the time to highlight the past? Back in Africa, there was an age division because the Baby Boomers and Gen X did not get along. The Baby Boomers saw the Gen X players as lazy and entitled much like the Gen X saw Millennials the same way 15 or years later. Couldn’t that have been brought back to show how much we have gone through since the show’s early beginnings?

With the rise of Netflix, binging and re-watching shows have become the ritualistic habit of the regular content consumer. We don’t get a new season of House of Cards or Orange is the New Black and watch one episode a week like it were cable. No, we see a new season came in, call in sick from work and watch that bitch all in one sitting. It’s just simply how it works now.

Wouldn’t be easy, in this kind of culture, for CBS and Survivor to find a way to get the show on Netflix? I know some seasons are on Amazon Prime and every season is on CBS All-Access but on a comparative scale, everybody has Netflix, fewer people have Amazon Prime and even less, CBS All-Access. It’s worth mentioning that Hulu also has seasons 12–31 on their platform as well. That is the closest we are getting to a Netflix-like platform carrying Survivor in its library.

By getting their show on a streaming platform like that, it would be an easy way for Survivor to show that it appreciates its own history. By giving the fans a chance to re-visit any season whenever they want, they allow people to go back and interpret the show’s past in their own way. From their end, they don’t have to worry about shoe-horning old seasons into current ones. For the fans, we get to watch Survivor history whenever we want. Stripped of any outside interpretation. It would be much more like a Survivor museum. Wouldn’t that be great?