Quick Thoughts on Survivor China

Well, I caught Survivor when it premiered tonight on CBS. Survivor is in its 15th season now and this time around, taking place in China now. I was a fan of the show when it first came out in the summer of 2000, but lost interest after a few seasons. I started watching Survivor a little bit more last season when CBS had divided the teams into four different racial tribes and when Yul Kwon was getting close to winning the game.

There are two Asian-Americans on Survivor China – “Frosti” who is half Japanese/half Russian, currently a film student at Columbia College in Chicago (he’s in his junior year – and apparently the youngest Survivor contestant ever) and Peih-Gee (pronounced “P.G.”, as in the movie rating), a Chinese-American born in Hong Kong, who works for her parents’ jewelry business. After Peih-Gee’s team lost the challenge, she was being portrayed as a little bossy as the team needed to finish up building their shelter and she was giving out orders. As the only Chinese-American on the show, it’ll be interesting to see how Peih-Gee is portrayed (on the CBS website, she claims to have scored 780/800 on her English SAT’s, but partied a lot at UCLA, got kicked out, attended junior college and got reinstated at UCLA, and graduated.)

So what’s my verdict?

I thought the show was okay. There are some interesting characters on the show, but overall, there was nothing terribly exciting. The show started off in Shanghai, which one quickly got a glimpse of before the contestants were shown taking a train to Jiangxi Province. I’ve only been to big cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shenzen) so it was interesting to see the more rural parts that Survivor is mostly going to take place in.

I would say the cheesiest part of the whole show was the immunity idol challenge,where the two teams have to go through the obstacle course carrying a traditional dragon dance set-up. I’ll probably watch a few more episodes before I’m likely to get bored.