Cochran
I talk very little about tv I watch anymore, especially reality tv. I don’t watch nearly as much tv as I once did although I could certainly get by with watching even less. One mainstay for me has always been Survivor.
There was a point in time where I thought I would make a good candidate for the show. I don’t know that is the case anymore, especially with my recent shift to no meat outside of fish and my aversion to killing anything.
So anyway, I found this season, Fans vs Favorites very entertaining. This time around they brought back a bunch of Survivor veterans to play a bunch of first timers. I was very happy to see one of these veterans was a guy with the last name of Cochran.
I found Cochran very interesting the first time he played, the biggest reason of which was he had a striking resemblance to Jeremy. Not only is there a body and face resemblance, aspects of his personality and thought processes make me think I am watching Jeremy’s long lost brother.
When I first mentioned this to Jeremy he took at as a mild insult. At first glance Cochran might just look like a geeky nerd but further observation reveals he is intelligent, well spoken and has a dry but very funny sense of humor. His one on one interviews where he talks about what is going on with other contestants and the game itself are some of the best I have ever seen on the show. Hell the guy just graduated from Harvard Law School.
So anyway, I was quite happy to see he not only won Survivor, he crushed the other two finalists, getting every single vote on the jury. Yes plowing through 3 hours of Tivo’d Survivor content ate up a good portion of my night (still managed to do a BB Challenge attempt earlier), but I still enjoyed it, even though this was the 13th season.
It is interesting how they handled the finale this year, they have always tried to tweak it. In the prior finales they had the jury on stage for the vote tally but then afterward they brought all of the contestants out on stage for Q&A. For a long time Jeff Probst had at least one question for each survivor player so nobody was overlooked. Then they started to no longer try to talk to everyone, leaving certain players, especially the ones that were eliminated early just sitting there smiling awkwardly the entire show.
This season they totally marginalized the non-jury cast. They remained in the audience the entire time and were basically just spectators. It was kind of weird. I understand the reason behind the decision. As is the finale show always felt rushed, 48 minutes just isn’t enough time to talk to 16 cast members and jam in all the other extraneous stuff.
I did have to question if it was a good use of time of the producers to bring in Boston Rob to give Phillip some dumb book or interview the original Survivor cast member, Rudy (85 years old now) just so he could use the word “queer” three times when referring to Richard Hatch. Even dumber was the pre-recorded clip of Hatch sitting naked on a beach chair addressing Rudy and his homophobia. (I thought he was still in jail for tax evasion)
So even with some of the finale dumbness, I thought this season was great and I will be once again on board for season 14.
Unfortunately watching all of that Survivor meant I only could get through 30 minutes of this weeks Game of Thrones before heavy eyelids forced me into submission.