New Jeff Probst Interview

Survivor host Jeff Probst talks about the 23rd season of Survivor on tv.msn.com. Here's an extract:

Going into the 23rd season, how do you keep things fresh?

That's the single biggest question every year is what can we do to that will twist the show just a little bit without really changing it? The goal is you always want to give the audience the same thing, only different. That's the conundrum. We have added different flavors: Exile Island, hidden immunity idol, last year our big twist was Redemption Island which we're bringing back again this year. The fact that we're doing Redemption Island is because we're bringing back two of our most popular players, Coach and Ozzy.

We looked at our list of all the popular players. Coach and Ozzy brought two different things. Ozzy is considered by a lot of people to be physically one of the most dominating players ever played. If you're a survivor fan, you've seen him play this game and seen how threatening he can be. His social game has never been very good. He's never been a threat to win because he still doesn't know or understand how to do it.

Coach is the guy that maybe isn't as dominating physically but his character is so big. His personality is so outrageous that people love to see what's up with the Dragon Slayer. What's he going to do this time? What he shares with Ozzy is that his social game is not very good. Last time in "Heroes vs. Villains," he was all over the map and he blew it. So we have two guys we felt really fit the theme of Redemption Island. They need a second chance to figure this game out." The thing that's working for them is they've both played twice before and people who are playing for the first time may not like that.

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So far there have only been male returning castaways, do you think we'll see any female ones in the future?

We debated bringing back a woman this season. The truth is we don't have as many great women as we do great men. We've had an equal number of men and women winners, almost evenly divided I think. When you look at our biggest characters and you go down the list, eight out of ten are men. You can't bring Pavarti back, she's already won. Some of the other women we wanted to come back like Shambo, didn't want to play again.

Follow this link for the full Q&A!