Story for the Week
I have been a Survivor fan since the very first season in 2000. I’m a big reality TV junkie in general (Confessions of a Reality TV Junkie), and Survivor has always been one of my favorites.
In college, I took a Group Dynamics course. When MTV launched The Real World in 1992, it felt like a televised group dynamics experiment. The introduction sums up the whole concept: “This is the true story of seven strangers, picked to live in a house, work together, and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”
Survivor seems like The Real World on steroids. Over the course of the seasons, 16 to 20 people lived in isolation (usually on an island) separated into competing tribes. With limited access to food, they build a shelter and experience grueling challenges as well as harsh conditions. Forced to come together as a team to win team challenges, voting people off the losing team, remaining cast members eventually merge and allies are forced to turn on each other. That is when I am most invested.
I have seen every single episode…maybe not live, sometimes recorded to watch the next day, always within the week because I didn’t want spoilers of who went home. While Corinne studied in Liverpool, she couldn’t watch our normal shows in real time. I told her I would wait to watch Grey’s Anatomy until she returned home. She didn’t care that I watched The Bachelor without her. For Survivor, I told her she was on her own. I gladly rewatched the episodes she had missed, but there was no way I planned to wait five weeks to start the season.
Survivor seems to be the type of show that people love or hate, with not much in between. There’s a lot to love about it, in my opinion. When Corinne was younger, she only wanted to watch the challenges and tribal council. As she has gotten older, she has started to appreciate the group dynamics piece of it as well.
We have watched two cast members get close enough to get married after their season and others become so bitter over the deceit that they never speak again. People develop real relationships when they spend 24 hours a day together with no outside influence. But at the end of it all, it is still a game where the winner gets a million dollars as the sole survivor.
The tag line for the show is “outwin, outplay, outlast.” In some seasons, it’s more like “out-lie, out-backstab, out-steal.” You have to have a strong enough challenge game to win, but you also have to have a strong social game to not get voted out. You have to know when to turn on your alliances to get to the end so that the people you voted out might still vote for you to win.
CBS recently announced the cast for season 50. (You read that right…two seasons a year over 25 years equals 50 seasons.) Season 48 just finished airing, and season 49 will air in the fall, but fans have been talking about season 50 for a while. In fact, during season 48, fans were able to vote on certain elements for season 50 gameplay. We weren’t able to vote on the cast, which was disappointing. It will be all returning players, and viewers had a ton of opinions on who should come back. Feedback on the final list has been less than stellar. 😶
The game changed from 39 days to 26 days during COVID and never went back. The creators call the difference old era versus new era. Despite the fact that the old era encompassed 40 seasons, only 12 of the 24 cast members will come from the old era. And there’s an entire decade of seasons with no representation at all. Three of the season 50 cast members come from the season that just aired (including three of the final four and the winner), and two come from the season no one has seen. It’s hard to be a fan favorite cast member when no one has seen you play.
Fans are upset at the selection of one old era cast member without another because they have always played together, and their animosity made for great television. Some game-changing cast members weren’t even asked. And several much-loved cast members weren’t invited or chose not to return. A couple of cast members have played multiple seasons, and others have won previously. It truly feels to me like they want a low-drama season by choosing none of the players traditionally thought of as villains. And Survivor tends to be better with drama.
I love a lot of the cast members selected, but I have to admit to being pretty disappointed overall. I don’t think there should be any previous winners, and I think it’s ridiculous that 20% of the cast comes from seasons 48 and 49. And the only way the 50/50 split between old and new era makes any sense is if they pit them against one another. Old era players had less access to food and played for 39 days. Twenty-six days and lots of food rewards should be a walk in the park for them…although they are also a lot older than the new era players.
Survivor is so mainstream that it even shows up in books now and then, like the one reviewed below. One of the characters tells a story about her husband being on a hiking trip at summer camp when he was a kid and says, “Beau still talks about the food rationing like he was on a season of Survivor.”
We’ll see how season 50 goes. It’s not like I’m not going to watch because…well, Survivor fan for life. 😉
Book Review
⭐⭐½
2.5 Stars for Happy Wife by Meredith Lavender and Kendall Shores
320 pages
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine | Bantam
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine | Bantam.
Publisher’s Description
Nora Davies doesn’t exactly fit in to Winter Park, Florida, where old-guard Floridians mix with the tax-fleeing coastal elite. Twenty-eight and barely making ends meet working at a country club, Nora feels like she’s going nowhere fast. Enter Will Somerset: a prominent forty-six-year-old lawyer, father to a teenage daughter, and recently divorced. The two set Winter Park’s social scene agog when they fall in love and marry after a whirlwind Cinderella-style courtship.
But Winter Park is fully upended when Will disappears the morning after a birthday bash Nora throws for him. Going back and forth between Nora and Will’s romance and the search in the wake of Will’s mysterious disappearance, Nora must answer the question from all angles: Where. Is. Will?
************
Main Characters:
- Nora – 28 years old, married to Will for less than a year, they met at the country club where Nora worked when she helped Will’s daughter Mia, has not been accepted as a part of the wealthy community in which they live
- Will – 46 years old, wealthy attorney, well-loved in the community, father to Mia, owns a law firm with Fritz
- Este – Nora’s best friend, married to Beau, lives next door to Nora and Will, also not very accepted in their community but she doesn’t care what other residents think of her
- Autumn – event planner for high-end events, Nora hired her to plan Will’s birthday party
- Fritz – Will’s law partner, he and Will went to law school together and inherited Fritz’s father’s firm
- Constance – Will’s ex-wife, does not like Nora, has lost her “standing” in the community since divorcing Will
- Marcus – local chef, owns a restaurant, good friends with Este and Beau
This story starts well. As it begins, Nora plays hostess to her first social event as Will’s wife, having hired the local event planner to organize a party for Will’s 46th birthday. The party doesn’t go off perfectly. Someone spills red wine on Nora’s white dress. Will and his business partner Fritz are overheard arguing.
By the end of the night though, Will and Nora head to bed happy when Will gets a call from his 14-year-old Mia. She left her favorite sweatshirt on the boat at the dock. Can Will get it for her? Will tells Nora to head up to bed and that he’ll be right back, and she falls asleep before he returns.
The next morning, Nora assumes Will left for work early. When she doesn’t hear from him for a couple of days, she’s angry that Will didn’t have the courtesy to let her know but assumes that he is again embroiled in work. It’s not until Fritz shows up at their home to complain that Will missed an important meeting that Nora realizes something is wrong.
Nora narrates the whole story, beginning with the night of the party, flashing back to meeting Will and the development of their relationship, and taking us through the investigation into Will’s disappearance. There is actually a lot to like about this story.
Will is relatively recently divorced. He meets Nora under not-so-ideal circumstances when Mia gets into a bit of trouble at the country club. He seems a little unsure how to pursue Nora, but there is clearly an attraction. I really enjoyed the flirtation between Will and Nora—even after they marry. They’re still pretty much newlyweds the night of the party.
“So how does it feel to be forty-six?”
“You mean officially closer to fifty than forty? Will you still love me when I’m fifty-six?”
“Of course”
“If my hair goes gray?”
“Salt and pepper hair? Sexy.”
“What if I start getting little white hairs in my ears?” he continues.
I feign disgust, pretending to gag. “Oh, ick. You really know how to flirt with a girl.”
He turns toward me, amused. “I didn’t know we were flirting.”
“Well, we’re certainly not now.”
I also like that there are a lot of characters who could be suspects. The authors did a great job creating suspicion over the course of the narration. As we learn more about Nora and Will’s relationship, we discover the cracks between the two of them as well as issues in other relationships with people outside of their marriage. I made a number of assumptions that were very wrong, which is really what I want in a thriller or suspense novel. I want to be surprised at the end.
That said, what really knocks the rating down for me is the pace of the story and some pieces of the investigation that I find hard to believe. In terms of pacing, again, it starts well. We know about 10% into the book that Will’s absence is suspicious. The back and forth between Will and Nora’s past and present helps build suspense…to a point.
I found myself about halfway through the book thinking it was just taking too long. Nora mentions early on in the book that Will regularly would disappear for days at a time, staying in a hotel buried in work. It makes it feel like Nora and Will have been together for several years at least, but it turns out they haven’t even been married for a year after a short courtship. How does she know what’s “regular” when they haven’t really been together that long? In fact, when Nora describes Will’s focus on work, she’s always walking by his home office. She never mentions him not being home for days at a time.
Almost every flashback reminds us what an outsider Nora is in the high-profile community. If the authors had opted to just change the timeframe completely, I think it would not have felt so drawn out. Start with the party and Will’s disappearance, shift to Will and Nora’s first meeting up to the present day, and then continue the story after the disappearance. I think this would have laid the groundwork better.
Because the book is only from Nora’s point of view, we don’t see anything related to the investigation unless it directly involves Nora. That drags things out a bit as well. A dual point of view might work better here. Maybe some of the backstory could have been from Will’s perspective. And I definitely feel like some of the investigation could have been told from the detective’s perspective without spoiling the mystery of what happened.
Finally, the resolution comes so close to the end of the book that it feels rushed. And without spoiling anything, I’ll just say the pieces of evidence that solve the mystery seem like things that would have come up a lot earlier in the investigation. It’s almost like they are included at the end just to create suspicion on multiple people that wouldn’t be suspicious if they were brought to light sooner. That feels like a bit of a cop-out to me, and the book overall is a miss. 🤷🏼♀️
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