How ‘Survivor’ Fans Built a New Community Around an Old Game

Under the twinkling lights of a still disco ball, a quiet, tense audience watches a man fight for his life. 

The room is full, as young and queer and young, queer New Yorkers in their twenties and thirties flit between tables and booths packed to the brim. This isn’t an election, or a championship football match, or the season finale of a prestige drama. It’s one of the hottest nights in television, all focus and tension aimed at a show that’s been running longer than many of its fans have been alive: Survivor. 

When Survivor first premiered in 2000, it presented the 15 million viewers who tuned in with an untested proposition: Would you watch a group of people struggle on a remote island in order to win $1 million? For 50 seasons, the answer has been yes. What’s changed is who’s paying attention. Hosted by Jeff Probst, Survivor has grown from a reality upstart to a stalwart fixture on network television. Twenty-six years — and 63 Emmy nominations — since its debut, Survivor should be gracefully entering its twilight era. Instead, the show is picking up speed, energy, and an entirely new generation of fans. They’re ambitious, competitive, cunning, and obsessed with all things Survivor. And they’re taking the game from a night-in activity to a live, in-person passion. 

“People are looking for places to talk about the show in real life,” says Gabe Bergado, who hosts the Williamsburg Survivor watch party. “Being able to feel that tension in a space with a bunch of other people, and that release when someone’s idol plays successfully — that’s an energy you just can’t replicate on your couch by yourself.” 

The premise of Survivor is fairly straightforward. Roughly 18 contestants are dropped off on a remote island, usually tropical, with only the clothes on their backs. They are divided into “tribes” and given colorful bandanas — known as buffs — to mark their allegiances. Then, simply put, they’ve gotta survive. This means building shelter, rationing small portions of rice, harvesting coconuts, or catching fish. But they also have to contend with physical and mental challenges, which include everything from scaling walls and holding onto slick poles to finishing giant puzzles. Food, tools, or safety in the game is on the line with every challenge. At the end of every episode, the losing tribe must convene a tribal council and vote someone off the island. Sure, body mass helps, but the variety of challenges — all done amid hunger, thirst, and sleep deprivation — mean that even the smallest contestant could win it all. 

According to Mario Lanza, host of the podcast Survivor Historians, the show’s young fanbase is surprising because it’s so different from the fans the show had for the first 20 years of its run. He credits this change to the Covid-19 pandemic and months of quarantine. When folks were home, unable to work, refusing to look at another abandoned sourdough starter or Clorox wiped-Amazon package, there, suddenly, was Survivor. Each season had 13 hour-long episodes. And even hits like Grey’s Anatomy couldn’t rival Survivor’s biggest draw: 39 seasons ready to stream. In a 2022 interview, even Probst noted that many of Survivor’s newest fans came from an influx of viewership over the pandemic.  

“The fan base is much younger than it used to be,” Lanza says. “When this show first started, the main sponsor of it was the United States Army. That was the demographic they wanted on the show — military vets, older people. It’s an entirely different fan base now. And the show wants these super fans to come out on the island and live their dream.” 

The IRL Component 

Bergado has been hosting his Survivor watch party, called Fruity Island, since 2021 at Crystal Lake bar. The event is often sold out, even on the lowest rated Survivor seasons. But he tells Rolling Stone what’s been fascinating to notice is the crowd getting younger and queerer since he started. Sometimes he even gets DMs from fans under 21 asking if they can attend. (They can’t. It’s a bar.) When asked about the surprising gay makeup of the Survivor fandom, Bergado finds it easiest to compare it to another RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has become famous for its in-person public watch parties. And while the show boast queer and LGBTQ+ drag performers, it also has a growing straight, female audience. “If [Drag Race] is gay TV for straight people, then Survivor is straight TV for gay people,” he says. 

It’s impossible to watch a show about humans stretching the bounds of hunger, exhaustion and mental fortitude without thinking about whether you could do that as well. George Nicolaidas, 50, isn’t kidding himself. Without food or comfort or sleep, he knows he gets cranky, probably making him a poor choice for a successful run on Survivor. But he’s always wondered if he could play the actual strategic and physical aspects of the game. So he started SBS — Survivor Brooklyn South — a shortened, in-person version he describes as an “entire season as survivor, basically on speed.” 

Since 2018, there have been 10 renditions of SBS, each more elaborate and detailed than the last. The group races across the grassy fields of Brooklyn’s Marine Park with homemade tribe banners, complete wall mazes or puzzles on fold-out tables set up in tennis courts. Each year they get around 250 applicants, from states as far as Texas and California, and whittle the group down to around 18 people. Then they compete in Brooklyn — with the correct permits — although that doesn’t always stop the friction of interacting with other groups. Once, Nicolaidas built a memory wall, complete with photos of current and former players. What he didn’t know was that there was a cancer charity walk being held at the park at the same time, and participants assumed each photo was a cancer survivor. “I was like, ‘Get this wall down!’” Nicolaidas says. “Take it down!”

Nicolaidas says he and other volunteers are skipping this year’s version of SSB so they can plan a multi-day version down the line. But he notes that as a show, Survivor remains a cultural phenomenon because of the people who take the game into the real world. “You know, we look like a bunch of crazy people running around a public park with buffs and set pieces,” he says. “But it’s not just this game that we do in a park. It’s a community of people who support each other and people who found each other through their love of a TV show.”

The Online Drive

For Tegwyth Alderson-Taber, 30, her Survivor obsession started because she was trying to schedule a date. In 2018, she first met her now-partner Ryan, but when they tried to find a time to hang out, he told Alderson-Taber in no uncertain terms that Wednesdays were off limits. That was Survivor night. “In my head, I was like, ‘Weirdo. Red flag,’” she tells Rolling Stone. But after she started watching, just trying out the show turned into a season-long binge. “I haven’t looked back since.” 

There have always been Survivor chat rooms, email lists, and fan clubs. But a budding new job in the Survivor ecosystem is drawing even more young viewers in to watch the series: the Survivor influencer.  After falling for both the man and the show, Alderson-Taber started posting the preseason predictions, power rankings, and strategy breakdowns she’d been filming for her friends and family. Now, she’s almost at 30,000 followers on TikTok, and it’s close to a full time job. 

While her content lives online, Alderson-Taber thinks much of the interest comes from a desire for in-person connection around Survivor, like live watch parties, Survivor simulations, or just fan meetups.  “People want to know that it’s not crazy that they love this show. They want to be able to discuss the moves. They want to be able to break things down. They want to have this community,” she says. “I’m lucky because I live in New York. If you’re in a small town, you probably don’t have access to a live event where you can experience people’s joy. Maybe you’re in high school, and nobody gets it. Social media has done a brilliant job of bringing that energy to them.” 

Influencer Lauren Ashley Beck tells Rolling Stone that the young age of many new Survivor fans also means people aren’t just content with the information given out through official channels. When Beck competed on Season 39, she says “people used to joke, ‘That show [is] still on?’” But during the pandemic, people began to ask her more and more questions about the behind-the-scenes makeup of the show. She began posting more seriously on TikTok, and now shares interviews on everything from reality television to pop culture with her half a million followers. She credits some of the young fanbase to the continued support of show alumni, who maintain a presence in the community long after their seasons end. 

When reality meets diversity

Surprisingly, Survivor’s reality format has done the most to court queer fans. Richard Hatch, the first-ever Survivor winner, was an out gay man, and was incredibly open about it during filming. He was brash, physically powerful, villainous, and even once got buck naked just for the hell of it. During Survivor: Game Changers in 2017, contestant Jeff Varner outed fellow player Zeke Smith as transgender during a tribal council. The cast was so upset that Varner, a gay man, was verbally voted out immediately rather than waiting for a formal vote, something that’s only happened in the game three other times. 

Survivor’s robust fan community doesn’t stop at the people lining up to wrestle in public parks or cram their way into a bar. It also directly impacts which people are cast on the show, many of whom are also superfans. Teeny Chirichillo, 25, wore a Survivor buff every day of high school — part of what landed him as a spot on Survivor Season 47 in 2024. He tells Rolling Stone that appearing on the show was supposed to be a last hurrah before top surgery, but ended up helping him confront his own ideas about being palatable and popular. 

“At the time, I wasn’t confident enough to declare something as big as ‘I’m trans, and I want you guys to use these pronouns for me.’ I was more concerned with being easy to absorb by all these different personalities, even though they were super kind and accepting of me,” he says. “But the process of the show really put me through the ringer and made me look inward. I realized I try to be what everyone wants, and it still doesn’t work. So what do I want? What feels comfortable? [It’s] taking this private relationship I have to my gender and asking the world and people to respect it and accept it. And that couldn’t have been done without enduring the game.”