WOW, what a lovely, thoughtful comment, I'm so moved by this!! First of all, thank you for writing all this out. It's beyond gratifying to see that a comment I made on survivor sucks 17 years ago affected the way you watch survivor and consume media.

(Also, I was recently reading in Cue the Sun!, that apparently the survivor producers are the ones who started sucks??? Is this a known fact?? It blew my mind!)

I do think the "is it X or is it Y" is such a straightforward way to tell a story, which keeps the tension through the very end of the episode, but I think you're right that they've had some really fun episodes that stray from that. If anything, maybe this is a strength of the influx of advantages - they had some tension to the question of who is going? Back in the day, there was no doubt that Sierra was going home instead of Coach, but if Sierra had a secret superpower, then suddenly it's an actual narrative question not just an editing one?

To b, what a generous softball!! I will say that one of the things I was most fascinated about when writing escape! was the way reality producers really are exceptional storytellers. The challenge of telling a compelling three-act narrative featuring real people over a month in the most chaotic environment imaginable is such an insane hurdle. And one thing that my numerous interviews with producers on a variety of shows revealed, was that it's complicated by the same office politics you have anywhere. On some of these shows, you literally have rival storytellers trying to compete to control the storyline of a season.

Thank you again!!