Laura and I watched the very first season of Survivor when it came out and we loved it. Then we watched the second and it was pretty good. Then we watched the third and after about five episodes decided that we didn’t want to just watch real humans dying of thirst. And then we mostly forgot about it. Fast forward to November of 2020. 8 months into quarantine and high on the exultation of having momentarily warded off a complete slide into fascism, we notice that Netflix has a couple seasons of Survivor. We decided to give Cagayan a try and now in March of 2021 we’ve watched almost 30 seasons. I’m starting a little late, but I want to jot down some of my per-season thoughts.

I’m going to make these in chronological order of seasons, although that isn’t how we watched them. We started with the assumption that we only wanted to watch the best, so we decided to just watch the top 10 seasons rated by Purple Rock. But after Fans vs Favorites we wanted to know more about Yau-Man and in doing so discovered that we have different criteria than Purple Rock, so now we’re watching most of them in chronological order.

I think I can recount my reactions pretty well, even though some of these were 5 months ago. I’m not going to bother with 1-3 though since those memories are decades old. Here’s what survived:

• Season 1 – What a cool show! I like that the older guy survives by being good at fishing!
• Season 2 – Someone kills a boar and then falls in a fire. And Colby is pretty great, I’m glad he gets his own reality show later.
• Season 3 – Watching people slowly die of thirst isn’t much fun.

So with that out of the way, let’s talk about ones I’ve watched recently!