Jeff Probst's 'Survivor 46' Premiere Tribal Council Reaction

Entertainment Weekly

Host and Executive Producer Jeff Probst chats with EW after the first elimination of 'Survivor 46'.

Transcript

00:00 Even though you're playing a game, you can still,

00:02 both can exist, that I want to blindside you,

00:05 but I really don't want to hurt your heart.

00:06 I'm not going to tell you I'm voting for you.

00:08 This is Survivor, dude.

00:09 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:13 Jelinski was in trouble, and he kind of saw

00:17 that in the first three days.

00:18 He put himself in situations to do the sweat task.

00:21 He put himself on the journey.

00:23 He put himself on the puzzle.

00:25 Those are big decisions, and if they work,

00:27 you can cement yourself and have good standing in your tribe.

00:31 If they don't work, you can be in trouble.

00:33 I thought it was honorable tonight the way

00:35 he owned his mistakes, finally, and tried

00:39 to see if he could recover.

00:40 And that seemed to be the question is,

00:42 is there a way for a guy who's saying he doesn't want to lie

00:46 and his feet hurt and all the injuries he had

00:48 to survive in this group?

00:50 And clearly, there wasn't.

00:51 Just from the outside, I would say it

00:53 was probably the right choice.

00:55 Not that Jelinski couldn't play a different game

00:57 if he played again, but these first three days,

01:00 those decisions you make often are very telling

01:04 at your first tribal council.

01:06 And I felt bad for him because even

01:09 though he seemed to think it was coming when it happened,

01:11 he did still seem shocked.

01:14 And it's hard.

01:16 When you hear somebody tell their story

01:17 and they come out here and they play their best version,

01:21 and it's not good enough.

01:23 But that high and that low and the contrast

01:26 is what Survivor's all about.

01:28 And that's why we have a vote.

01:30 And that's why a torch does get snuffed,

01:32 because when you get to the end, what it means

01:34 is it didn't happen to you.

01:36 You survived tribal after tribal after tribal.

01:39 That's the game.

01:40 There's been a weird thing sort of happening lately

01:43 that I've been picking up on, which

01:44 is this feeling that it's OK to just be good.

01:48 I tried.

01:49 I'm going to quit.

01:50 I tried.

01:51 I've done that enough.

01:52 My feet hurt.

01:53 And I don't have any stake in it.

01:57 But you can't quit and then say something

02:00 about the word "several" meaning seven,

02:02 because it's in the word.

02:03 That's just not going to fly.

02:05 So yeah, I was pushing back.

02:06 And Jelinski finally did own it.

02:08 It took quite a bit of work to get him to own it.

02:12 And I think that justifiable ethics, the way we couch things

02:16 and the way we see it is one of the things that's

02:18 so interesting about Survivor.

02:20 If Q had had a different partner,

02:22 I'm not sure they would have quit.

02:24 My guess is Q realized, I can't do it alone.

02:27 He's going to give up.

02:28 So let's just stop now.

02:30 Let me cut my losses now.

02:32 And that's probably one of the reasons Jelinski's gone.

02:35 It's interesting to hear his words up in the voting booth,

02:38 because he was clearly trying to sell Jess as the one to go

02:42 and make it feel like it was him to blindside her.

02:46 And he clearly had no idea that the entire tribe

02:50 had turned on him.

02:51 That's the brutal part of the game.

02:53 And the irony is, here's a guy who said, I don't want to lie,

02:56 and five people lied to him.

02:57 The one thing I didn't want to hammer Jelinski on,

03:01 but he did seem to have a bit of this happened to me,

03:05 this happened to me, I had no chance.

03:07 We've done a lot of sweat challenges.

03:09 No one has ever failed.

03:11 And no one has ever quit.

03:12 We test our tasks and our challenges

03:15 so they can be successful, but they require work.

03:18 So he painted it as though it was impossible.

03:21 It's not.

03:22 We tested it a lot.

03:23 We could probably do it again next season

03:25 and it would be accomplished.

03:26 Just happened to be his feet were hurting him.

03:29 I don't know how bad they are.

03:31 They sound pretty bad.

03:32 So that's real.

03:32 Those things can happen and make it hard to get around,

03:35 but you got to own it.

03:37 And I'm sure that was a part of the group decision

03:40 as well, is that if you can't own it here,

03:42 then it's hard to maybe trust you to own it in the future.

03:45 I'm not out there.

03:46 I don't know all the minutia.

03:48 I don't know all the details.

03:49 I just see the big picture.

03:50 I think Jelinski is going to look back and think,

03:53 I could have played it differently.

03:54 I hope he doesn't beat himself up.

03:56 Survivor's a game you play.

03:58 You take a shot.

03:59 It works.

04:00 It doesn't work.

04:01 But all you can do is play your game.

04:03 Jelinski played his game.

04:05 It didn't work.

04:06 He got voted out.

04:06 One of the hardest things to translate to the audience

04:10 is how real it is.

04:11 And we can say all we want.

04:13 Think of the last time you were hungry

04:15 and you got hangry and all that stuff.

04:17 But you're talking days.

04:19 And as Jelinski said, sleeping on bamboo,

04:22 it's not comfortable.

04:24 You do it because it's the best alternative,

04:26 but Survivor is difficult.

04:28 And I think seeing Jess try to deal with that

04:31 several times tonight, struggling with her words,

04:35 that's real.

04:36 And hopefully she'll get over that hump

04:39 because some players don't,

04:40 and they're never able to fully form a sentence.

04:42 And the reason that matters is

04:44 if you don't have all of your faculties,

04:46 it's hard to make an argument.

04:48 It's hard to persuade.

04:48 It's hard to remember your lie.

04:50 It's hard to play this game.

04:52 It's hard enough to play it

04:54 when you're on all cylinders are running,

04:56 but every day just takes a little more away from you

05:00 and depletes you a little more

05:01 and makes it a little more difficult.

05:02 And every time you come here,

05:04 that fire is burning behind you

05:05 and you want to leave with it still burning.

05:08 There sometimes is a separation between watching it at home

05:12 and trying to understand why it can be so emotional

05:15 and being the player for whom it is emotional.

05:18 And a lot of that is deprivation.

05:20 Also, not just food and sleep,

05:22 but deprivation from trust, people that you can talk to.

05:26 You don't know who you can trust out here.

05:28 And then suddenly it rains or you're hungry,

05:31 or you go look for coconuts together

05:33 and you form a bond that you can't believe

05:35 you formed with this stranger.

05:37 And then you lose and realize you have to vote somebody out.

05:39 And if you have empathy, that can happen.

05:42 Even though you're playing a game,

05:43 you can still, both can exist

05:45 that I want to blindside you,

05:47 but I really don't want to hurt your heart.

05:49 I don't think anybody wanted to hurt Jelensky.

05:51 He's a nice young guy,

05:53 but I'm not going to tell you I'm voting for you.

05:55 This is a survivor, dude.

05:56 So I think that's where the emotion comes from.

05:58 It's this conflicting collision of playing the game,

06:02 but knowing you're playing it with other people

06:03 who also want to play the game.

06:05 One of the biggest changes in the last year, really,

06:08 is we took on new cameras and made the investment

06:12 to change out the way we shoot the show.

06:14 And that allowed our teams to come in and say,

06:16 we can make it even more cinematic.

06:18 And it's hard to probably see right now through your iPhone,

06:21 but it's very dark out here.

06:23 I mean, it feels real.

06:25 It does not feel like you're on a television set

06:27 that's being shot and going to be broadcast on CBS.

06:30 That's because we can shoot in lower light,

06:33 and then we have teams that are able to say,

06:34 I can light this with fire and just a few lights scattered

06:38 to get maybe just a key light on somebody.

06:40 But it feels cool, and I like it.

06:43 And Tribal's bigger now.

06:44 We have more space.

06:45 There's more depth.

06:47 I'm waiting for a group of people

06:48 to get up and do one of those conversations at Tribal

06:51 to see how far back they're going to go on the set

06:54 and how far we can carry them, because we never

06:57 know what's coming either.

06:59 (bell chimes)

07:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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