Survivor New Zealand

Ever since Survivor ended, I've had to settle in for a long summer until the next season arrives. But in that time I made a startling dicovery that New Zealand started their own version of Survivor a few years back and have 2 FULL seasons under their belt!

Well of course when I found that out, I went at once to YouTube to watch the entire 1st season. Here's my thoughts....

The Good

 The game has a lot of throw back challenges that I missed seeing in Survivor. I won't go over all of them because there were too many to count and would be difficult to explain without pictures. It was awesome seeing the old school challenges again.

Another interesting thing was the fact that another Survivor has been going on at another part of the world for 2 years and I didn't even know about it?!? Crazy.

Sala. Out of all 16 contestants, he was the only one worth their salt to be out there. He was a great competitor to watch and played with honor like Colby did back in season one. Those guys are super rare to find in the game these days so it was refreshing to see a player of that caliber in the game again. 

And, that's about it for the "good"

The Bad

There's a lot.

The game is slow, I mean SLOOOOOOOW. So much down time is filmed where the contestants do nothing but sit around talking about nothing. The game was so slow at times there were episode where NO ONE was voted off and NOTHING happened!

The host of the show is obviously trying to copy Jeff Probst as best he can. It's funny and a little lame at the same time. I wish he would've developed his own personality for the show but I guess you go with what works so....

The contestants are VERY aware of the cameras on them and no one wants to have a bad image so they're very self conscious which made for a very flat season. There was one episode where one girl (who'd flipped on every alliance she ever made) was called out on it mid-way through the game. She spent the rest of her time in the game, crying about how she was going to look like the "villain" in the season.

Yup. Everyone cared more about their image than playing the game.

The worst part was the winner. Billed as a "good guy who played with honor" the guy played the game as a complete spoiled brat. He whined when his alliance turned against him and sat on the beach for the next 3 days pouting about it.

He railed about how he played with "honor and integrity" yet he turned on his first alliance and broke his promise 4 episodes later! Saying "there was nothing I could do"

Another childish moment was after losing several challenges in a row to another player, he took off running down the beach to pout about how he wasn't winning anything. Yeah, a really "great" guy, I can see that.

Overall, it was interesting to watch. I can't recommend it unless you have nothing to do and love Survivor as I do. But I'm glad I got a chance to check it out.