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After 45 seasons, Survivor is anything but a castaway for CBS.
The latest season concludes Wednesday night, and the broadcaster is breathing a sigh of relief knowing that its new 90-minute episode strategy for both Survivor and The Amazing Race paid off. CBS’ Wednesday primetime audience is up 19% year-over-year.
For the first time since 2014, CBS is topping Wednesdays, thanks in part to the 25-54 demo that remains committed to its reality competition programming.
Based on Nielsen’s most current data, Survivor is averaging 6.59M viewers and 1.6 rating among adults 25-54 per Season 45 episode. That marks a 4% audience increase year-over-year.
As Nielsen records declining levels of persons using television, CBS is calling this a win. And it is. While under 7M viewers may have seemed fairly low even a few years ago, attracting that kind of audience on linear TV is becoming increasingly rare as more people cut the cord and lean into streaming. In 2017, Season 35 of Survivor managed about 7.9M viewers during the fall broadcast window. So, retaining more than 80% of its audience over the last six years isn’t too bad.
The 2023/2024 broadcast season marks the fifth time that Survivor has been No. 1 among adults 25-54 since it debuted in 2000. The series reclaimed that title in the 2021/2022 broadcast season for the first time since 2001/2002. Survivor also continues to be Top 5 in total viewers among non-sports programming, and it comes in behind The Voice (both Monday and Tuesday airings) to be the No. 3 unscripted entertainment program.
CBS has previously reserved the 90-minute episode of Survivor for special events. However, this season, it a gamble by deciding to commit to that episode length each week. While it may have seemed like the network’s response to the summer of dual writers and actors strikes that delayed fall scripted programming, President of CBS Entertainment Amy Reisenbach says the decision was made long before the threat of a labor action loomed.
“It was a discussion that came up very late last year,” she said, adding that she sat down with George Cheeks, president and CEO of CBS at the end of 2022 to “think more long term.”
She continued: “And this idea was born out of that meeting…It seemed like a great way to again freshen up the shows, give the audience more of what they’re craving and love and allow the shows a little bit more room to breathe and try new things and it’s really paid off in so many great ways.”
Reisenbach credits the 90-minute episodes as one of the factors that has kept audiences around for Season 45, given the fact that the producers of both Survivor and Amazing Race were given ample heads up they’d need to produce the extra content.
An easy task for both reality shows, which Reisenbach admits “always have extra footage on the floor.”
The episode length did allow some breathing room for the show to reintroduce a longer intro, feature additional challenges, and bring back the Survivor action, which was last seen in 2015 and was reinvented for Season 45.
“They were able to really prepare and strategize in the way they structured competitions, structured twists, dug farther into contested backstories. I think that all has [come] together to create really outstanding creative this season,” Reisenbach continued.
Thanks to streaming, Survivor is also finding younger audience. According to Paramount Global, streaming across Paramount+ and CBS digital apps is up 54% year-over-year on an average minute audience basis, with viewers who are, on average, 20 years younger than those watching on broadcast.
Those audiences seem to be catching up on what they missed in the last 44 seasons, as CBS’ parent company also reports that 57% of the total time spent watching Survivor on Paramount+ was prior seasons. In all, Survivor is up 72% year-over-year in terms of total time spent watching, making it the No. 3 reality program on the platform. As is typical, Paramount Global remains mum on exact viewership figures for Survivor or any of its other titles on streaming.
The show also ranks as CBS’s most co-viewed series with kids, indicating a broad, multi-generational audience for the series, according to Paramount Global.
Interestingly enough, Paramount Global also says data shows the audience composition of Survivor is similar to prestige dramas like Netflix’s All the Light We Cannot See. Reisenbach reasons this is because Survivor is among the ranks of “prestige reality.”
“They’re the grande dames of reality television. They’re so honest with their gameplay and it’s really about heart and at the end of the day, they’re real people, but they feel like you’re watching characters and you feel like you get to know them, just the way you would on a Netflix series,” she told Deadline. “It’s equally addictive and you want to talk about it with your friends. There’s a huge community, it’s a multi-generational community.”
Survivor remains one of the longest running reality competition programs in television history, behind only MTV’s The Challenge, which premiered two years earlier in 1998. The series’ host Jeff Probst holds the crown as the longest serving reality series host for a single show in television history.
Somehow, it is still going strong for CBS even after such a long run — and Season 45’s performance indicates blue skies ahead for the series into the coming year.
Reisenbach says the strategy for the show moving forward will not change much, because “it’s not broke, so we’re not looking to fix it.”
However, the network will continue to evaluate how Survivor can adapt. That, she stresses, is another key to the longevity of the series. They will continue to ask questions of their long-running series, including: “How can they make the shows better? How can they find twists that surprise the audience? How do we dig deep in terms of who we cast?”
“So we honor their really long past legacies while also continuing to make sure that shows always feel really fresh,” she said.
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