If you’ve been watching Australian Survivor Blood vs Water you will have noticed a handful of people getting a lot of screen time and others next to none. It’s almost as though the editors have actively decided to leave people out of the game. Most notably,
- Jay was voted out without a single confessional
- The twins Mel and Michelle only had 1 confessional between them until episode 13 and
- Dave has a streak of 11 episodes without a confessional
Josh has been a target for the last few episodes for being a strategic mastermind and ‘running the game’. This is news to most viewers since that doesn’t come across in the edit.
This is obvious to see when looking at the distribution of confessionals across each episode. A handful of players are getting more than 3x their equal share of confessionals for the episode and others none. For most of the episodes that have aired, about half the castaways did not receive a confessional for that episode. Given how long the episodes are time isn’t the limiting factor.
To date, 18 episodes have aired and approximately 40% of the cast have more than 50% of episodes with 0 confessionals. For example, if a player was in the game for 7 episodes and received at least 1 confessional for only 3, they would fall into this category.
This has not occurred in the US versions of Survivor as they are generally well-balanced. There are only 52 out of 748 players across 41 seasons that fall into this category. The worst offending season is Season 23: South Pacific with 5 players fitting this category, or 28%. In total 36 seasons have 2 or less players receiving this treatment which is a pretty good record. In which case, it is fair to say Survivor Blood vs Water is very unbalanced.
You can see the imbalance easily by comparing the confessional distribution for each US season to Survivor Blood vs Water. It is particularly obvious for well-edited seasons such as season 37: David vs Goliath. The AU chart is inset for easy comparison. As a guide, the more even the colour and the fewer dots mean a more balanced coverage of the players for the season.
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