Jeff Probst Reveals How ‘Survivor’ Has ‘Reevaluated’ Idol Hunts

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Survivor Season 46 Episode 11, “My Messy, Sweet Little Friend.”]

Survivor Season 46 has had one clear trend: immunity idols often go home with the week’s eliminated player. It happened with Tiffany last week and Hunter the week before that, as well as Tevin a few episodes prior. The pattern repeated yet again in Episode 11 when a player found an idol, didn’t use it to shield themselves, and got eliminated all in one episode.

Every time an idol gets flushed out, one gets put back in the game, leading surviving players on idol hunts. The Survivor 46 cast has hunted for idols so often this season, but one of the wildest goose chases came in Episode 11 on May 8. Jeff Probst says that this season’s idol pattern made the production team “reevaluate” things.

The search for the idol was a long, fun sequence that involved most of the players. Kenzie was still reeling from having her blindside thunder stolen, Q and Charlie were looking for it to bolster their group alliance’s chances of success, and just about everyone (except Liz, who took a nap) wanted the beaded string for protection and a resume booster. They searched far and wide on the island, and Probst feels this fun sequence is an area in which production has improved recently.

They’ve gotten good at “showing the audience how difficult it is to find something in a jungle,” Probst said in the May 8 episode of Survivor‘s On Fire podcast. While we only see some pieces of the hunt as viewers, Probst says that idol searches often happen “over a series of many days, so [players] are trying to keep track of where they already looked.” The scenes are fun now, in Probst’s view, because production took a long look at where they could improve in recent seasons.

“This is an area where we literally sat down and said, ‘We’re not doing a good enough job, so let’s reevaluate and reassess how we do this,'” he says on the podcast. “And we really leaned into how we shoot these idol hunts now. We have much more variety in terms of camera angles and where we put the camera in relation to the player.”

Player confessionals play a big part in their new filming style.

“We also spend a lot more time in our interviews so that a player like Dee [Valladares, Season 45 winner and co-host of the podcast] can say, ‘All right, here’s the deal: I’ve been doing this for five days. I’m down to one last section of the jungle,'” Probst explains. “And now you’re leaning in going, will she find it here? And then with [90-minute episodes], you have the time to put all that together and show it. And the goal is always the same: you want to take the audience deeper inside the process of being a player, and in this case it’s them looking for an idol.”

After struggling to make strong alliances all season long, Venus looked like she might have been able to break some ground with Kenzie in the beginning of the episode. It was Kenzie’s idea to vote out her closest ally, Tiff, but she got cold feet so Maria led the charge instead and left Kenzie out of the loop.

Venus tried to turn this into a positive for both of them, saying they could work together to turn their fates around. She joined the idol hunt as another failsafe plan and actually found it! But she made the same mistake three other players before her did by not using the idol to protect herself from elimination. We’re begging someone in Survivor 46 to use an idol for their intended purpose. Find out more behind-the-scenes details about Season 46 Episode 11 in the full episode of the On Fire podcast embedded below.

There’s just seven players and two episodes left in Survivor Season 46. As Probst recently told TV Insider, idols are going to have a “huge” effect on the remaining episodes.

“This has been a season so far where nearly every idol that’s been in the game has left the game in somebody’s pocket,” he told us. “So that starts influencing anyone else who has an idol as they determine, ‘Am I going to play it?’ and ‘Will I be safe?’ or ‘Am I going to risk being the next person to get voted out with an idol?’ So, it has a huge impact on the psyche of the player.”