Wednesday night marked the second episode of the 47th season of Survivor—and with it, the end of an all-too-brief era. For a certain member of the chattering class, this season held the sort of promise not seen since Mike White nearly conquered that Fijian beach: a chance to watch a famous writer make a fool of themselves on national television. This year's media surrogate was none other than Pod Save America co-host Jon Lovett, a man whose list of former employers includes Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Aaron Sorkin. None of this impressed his tribe, who voted him out at the end of last week's premiere episode.
This week's elimination was arguably even more of an upset, but still, I found myself largely unmoved, if not bored. Some important context might be needed here: I'm not a Survivor superfan. I hesitate to even call myself a fan. Until last Wednesday, I'd watched exactly half of one season while high in an Airbnb in Burlington. If reality television is a spectrum, my tastes trend more toward docusoap (think Real Housewives, Wife Swap, Selling Sunset) than competition-based programming. It most likely comes down to the fact that I fundamentally do not understand the kind of person who would voluntarily spend weeks without running water. But what I do understand is podcasters—specifically the kind of podcaster that Lovett is. He's the sort that will say on national television, with an ain't-I-a-stinker face, "And now when people ask me what I do, I have to say that I'm a fucking podcast host."
I understood what Lovett was going for here. It's objectively a little silly to sit in front of a microphone all day reading Betterhelp ads. Still, there's something gauche in performing embarrassment over an incredibly lucrative internet job, especially when members of Lovett's tribe include nurses who are presumably being puked and shat upon all day. And this wasn't one small faux pas. Nearly everything Lovett said in what he self-described as his "one glorious and perfect episode" made me screw up my face in self-conscious repulsion.
There was the first moment we heard him speak, when he, upon being asked by host Jeff Probst to describe the energy on the beach, launched into a clearly prewritten speech. There was the moment he asked his tribe full of Zoomers if they'd ever heard of Pod Save America. Or when he attempted to relate to them by revealing he's addicted to TikTok. He grandstanded all the way until the end when, as his torch was being extinguished, he told Jeff that it "burned bright and fast." The chuckle he got from Jeff is the same one I got as a child when recounting a knock-knock joke.
Despite Lovett's flailing, there were other obvious choices for elimination, including one that my colleague Giri Nathan described as "one of the most obviously self-imploding characters ever on the show, who basically begged out loud to be ousted." But I wasn't necessarily surprised when Lovett's tribe chose to vote against him. I would do the same. He seems like a narc. And when I turned to my more Survivor-pilled colleagues to get a better explanation on what it was about Lovett that made him fail so emphatically, Sabrina Imbler had this to say: "Every answer he gave to Jeff felt like it was coming from a guy analyzing the show, not a guy in the show, and in doing so he endowed himself with this kind of superiority complex." As Patrick Redford put it, "He was doing the podcast host thing of not talking to you, the person, but talking to some imagined audience." Lovett's tribe clearly picked up on this dynamic, along with his unfortunate lack of muscle mass.
Still, as I tuned in last night, Crunchwrap Supreme in hand, I couldn't help but feel like something was missing. Maybe I'm part of the audience Lovett was imagining: a media girlie tuning into Survivor for the first time in years to see an industry peer flop. Maybe Lovett, despite not being this season's only podcast host, was just the one I could read most easily. Whatever it was, it's gone now, snuffed out far too soon—and with it, my interest in Survivor.
