‘Survivor’ Producers Confirm Last-Minute Tribe Swap Before Filming Season 50

Longtime “Survivor” host Jeff Probst has spoken extensively about just how difficult it was to cast “Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans.” 

The franchise’s first returning-players season in five years, the golden anniversary installment required Probst and his fellow producers to narrow down a pool of more than 700 potential returnees to a cast of just 24 players, still the largest the show has ever seen. 

Even with a finalized cast, however, producers like Matt Van Wagenen – who joined the show during its 14th season, “Survivor: Fiji” – still had plenty of decisions to make. Namely, figuring out how to divide the cast into three separate, mostly equal, tribes. 

Speaking to Men’s Journal after the premiere of “Survivor 50” on Wednesday (Feb. 25), Van Wagenen revealed that decisions regarding which players would start the game on which tribes continued straight up until filming began, resulting in a last-minute swap that undoubtedly altered the course of how the season plays out. 

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Matt Van Wagenen Explains Decision to Re-Shuffle ‘Survivor 50’ Tribes Right Before Filming

CBS

“There was one – I won’t say who – but there was one last-minute change,” Van Wagenen revealed, adding, “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.”

While we’ll likely never know the details of the last-minute tribe swap, some things were always going to be true about the season’s tribe makeups. 

With 24 returning players – 12 men and 12 women – there were always going to be four men and four women on each of the season’s three respective tribes. Each tribe also featured one returning winner in its ranks: Dee Valladares (Kalo), Kyle Fraser (Vatu) and Savannah Louie (Cila).

The tribes also feature a (fairly) even split of challenge beasts, strategic threats and wild card additions to the cast. For example, producers were careful to place challenge beasts like Ozzy Lusth, Jonathan Young and Colby Donaldson on separate tribes. 

After a final restructuring of the tribes in the final hour before Season 50 filming began, Van Wagenen reported, “Once we had all the cards laid out, it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is good. There’s representation of different types of people and eras. And it feels right.’”

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Van Wagenen Argues ‘Survivor 50’ is NOT ‘New Era vs. Old School’

CBS

While the “Survivor 50” cast is also split down the middle when it comes to “Old School” and “New Era” representatives, however, Van Wagenen was adamant that the season was a celebration of the entirety of the show’s unprecedented 26-year run, not a battle between the two eras. 

“We didn’t want it to be [New Era vs. Old School],’ Van Wagenen told Men’s Journal. “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.” 

Producers drove home the point that the anniversary season was not designed to be an Old vs. New showdown by ensuring that each of the three tribes had a roughly equal number of players representing each “era.” 

CBS

The Kalo Tribe is the only one, however, to have an exactly equal number of Old School and New Era players, with four of each. The Vatu Tribe, by comparison, has five New Era players and three Old School ones, while the Cila Tribe has the opposite, three New Era and five Old School. 

While these disparities could be by design, they could also be the result of Van Wagenen’s last-minute shake up to the cast. Did the producers pull a New Era representative from the Cila Tribe to join the Vatu tribe? And, if so, who got swapped? 

For now, the answer will remain a mystery. 

Be sure to catch “Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans” when it returns to CBS screens nationwide on Wednesday, March 3 at 8:00pm ET.