Jeff Probst explains that Survivor Tribal Council jury change (exclusive)

“We’ll now bring in the first member of our jury.”

Now there’s a sentence we haven’t heard in a while — until Wednesday night, that is.

Back in the good ol’ days of Survivor, the current players would walk into Tribal Council and take a seat. Then, and only then, host Jeff Probst would welcome the jury members to strut in and take their seats. It was an opportunity for bitter ousted contestants to throw eye daggers at those that did them dirty. It also offered those jury members a few seconds of spotlight time and allowed viewers to marvel at the latest casualty’s new post-shower look.

But when the new post-Covid Survivor era began with season 41, the jury walk-in was abandoned as producers sought to save precious seconds of airtime wherever they could to deliver an all-killer, no-filler product. Instead, the jury would already be in their seats when the still-active players arrived.

When Survivor moved to super-sized 90-minute episodes with season 45, many elements of yesteryear like the title sequence and “previously on…” recap that had gone by the wayside returned to glorious praise and excitement. But not the jury entrance.

That changed this week on Survivor 47 when the contestants entered and assumed their regular seats, and then Probst instructed the first juror, Sierra Wright, to walk down the loser’s Tribal Council catwalk. While it may seem insignificant to most, bringing back the Jury perp walk was a welcome sight for longtime Survivor obsessives who, well, obsess over such trivial matters. So why the change back from extra crispy to the original formula? We asked Probst exactly that — although we did not use the phrase “extra crispy.”

“Well, I could make up a really interesting story about how a group of us sat around a fire discussing the pros and cons of having the jury walk into Tribal Council,” the host and showrunner tells Entertainment Weekly while preparing to give a well-placed shout-out to this writer’s favorite cheap beer. “I could describe in vivid detail how things got passionate as we debated very late into the night over several cans of Milwaukee’s Best! And how at one point, [challenge producer] John Kirhoffer even stood up on a table and like a Survivor preacher proclaimed, ‘We need to see the jury walk in so we can all heal!’” And how after that, nobody really understood what we were arguing about anymore.”

So is that what actually happened? Sadly, no. “I could make up a story like that, or I could tell you the much less interesting truth,” Probst says. “It was a very casual suggestion from [executive producer] Matt Van Wagenen. I think he literally said, ‘Maybe we should see the jury walk in this season?’ And so we did.”

I mean, I kind of like the first version better, but either way, we’ll take it! However, that’s not the only change we noticed on this week’s episode of Survivor 47. It looked very dark in those last scenes on the beach before the contestants left for Tribal Council — much darker than usual. Did producers give the players more time at camp because they were all splintered off in different places after the challenge and the vote was still moving around? What’s the deal, Probst?

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“It’s a really good question,” he responds. “Here’s how it works: Most Tribal Council nights, we follow a schedule of when players need to leave to go to Tribal. In most cases, the timing works out fine because the players have had all the conversations they need to have in order to make their decision about who they want to vote out.”

The host continues: “But there are occasions when, for a variety of reasons, we feel the players need more time; for instance, if we got them back to their camp later than we had originally scheduled, then the producer on the beach might make the call that they simply need more time to strategize about the vote. Or it could be a situation where there is so much happening, and the story is still turning, so the producer might make that same call. We’re fine with that as it’s fair for everyone and we can start Tribal as late as we need to in order to accommodate the scramble that is happening at camp.”

While the producers make the judgement call on when the players are ready, it is not up to the players on when to go. “I do want to be clear,” Probst adds, “the decision to extend the time at the beach is a rare occurrence and only made by the producers on the beach based on the situation. If we asked the players if they wanted more time, they would almost always say, ‘Yes!’ because they’re never confident that the last conversation they had is the last one they need to have, which is why we have an end time for the scrambling already laid out in advance.”

And now when they get to Tribal Council, they get to watch the jury walk in.