Survivor: Tocantins – The TV Guide Network Preview

It’s almost Survivor time again! And you know what that means – the TV Guide Network has a preview. Each season, this special is hosted by the previous season’s winner, so this season it’s Bob, right? Wrong. Apparently, somebody decided that it would be better for Sugar to host. That would be third-place Sugar, the actress. We want Bob! We want Bob! We want Bob!

Well, the chanting doesn’t seem to be working, so I guess we’ll just go ahead. Sugar says in this hour, they will be revealing “everything you want to know” about the new season. Somehow I doubt that.

Sugar explains that the mountainous-desert area of Tocantins is much different from Season 6’s Amazon area. Host Jeff Probst says the Amazon is dark and spooky while Tocantins is hot, with sand dunes and rivers where the water is so clean they can just drink it straight. Well, that will certainly make things easier in the first few days – there won’t be nearly the need to build a fire as there usually is.

Probst continues that it’s a very open area that will be hard on the contestants because of the heat. Sugar returns to tell us that the “dry heat” has been a production concern. Why? We always hear it’s not the heat but the humidity. Oh, Probst is telling us – it’s because of a large number of fires, including one that almost burned down Tribal Council! Fire would not have represented life in that case.

Probst says they are trying to set a tone about the importance of first impressions. This leads to the first twist of the season, which I discussed a few weeks ago when the cast was introduced. Probst goes into more detail, saying the tribes will be asked to vote one person out of each tribe, and he will be vague about whether or not those two people will be out of the game. But what actually will happen is that each of those players will be flown by helicopter to the camps, while the other players will have a four-hour trek to get there.

That means the “voted out” person will have a big head start. They can either start to work around camp and build a shelter using the materials being left there by producers, or do they go looking for a hidden immunity idol, for which clues will also be left. If I had already been voted off once, I know what I’d do – hidden immunity idol, here I come!

Probst says Exile Island is a desolate sand dune. Two people will go to Exile Island each time – the winning tribe will choose somebody from the losing tribe to go, and that person will choose somebody from the winning tribe. When they arrive, there will be two containers; they will each pick one and break it open. One will have a clue, the other will have nothing.

More importantly, those on Exile Island have a choice as to where they go back – they can either return to their previous tribe or mutiny and go to the other tribe! That should be interesting!

What about the contestants? Probst says he loves them, while a producer calls them “the best cast I’ve seen in a long time.” Probst says for at least a couple of them, we’ll be wondering where the heck producers found them.

Sandy, a 53-year-old bus driver from Kentucky, is one of the biggest characters, according to Sugar. Sandy says she is a country girl and a tomboy. So she’s a country tomgirlboy? I dunno. Anyway, she says she is adventurous and gets excited over little things. It’s hard to contain herself. She’s a grandmother of two and the oldest contestant this season. In fact, she says some of the other contestants aren’t much older than her 14-year-old grandson!

Probst says Sandy “doesn’t think twice about cursing … it’s effortless for her and therefore it’s kind of charming.” Sounds like we’ll be hearing a lot of the bleep button. But heck, those of us in Illinois are used to that, from the tapped phone calls of our now ex-governor. Talk about being voted out of the tribe!

Getting back to Sandy, Probst continues that he doesn’t know how she will get over being seen as a liability due to her age. Sugar says Sandy isn’t the typical grandma, from her “saucy language right down to her tramp stamp.” Now maybe I just don’t know the lingo, but I thought “tramp stamp” was any tattoo in certain locations. Sandy, however, not only has a Superman logo tattoo on the small of her back, but she has incorporated the words “Tramp Stamp” into the tattoo! I don’t know what to say to that.

Moving on, we have Joe, 26, from Austin, Texas. He says he’s a fan of testing himself physically. But he’s not a fan of overdramatic people, according to Sugar (oh, he would have loved her, then). He thinks people like that have a lot to learn.

Probst says Joe is a good-looking guy, “and he knows it.” And he looks like he will be a challenge threat. Joe says his weakness could be getting overconfident and not totally going along with the flow of the game because he could get too headstrong. Probst has big hopes for Joe.

Erinn is also 26, and is a hairstylist who hails from Wisconsin. She says she gets a lot of comparisons to Parvati. But she doesn’t think Parvati’s “genius” plan of letting everybody else do the dirty work for her will work again. She says if the others want to think she’s a “little princessy” at the beginning, she’s okay with that. She doesn’t want to give away too much, too fast. I’m thinking if the others think that and she doesn’t counter it, she might not have long to show them who she really is!