Survivor 50 Mystery Box: Now I kinda feel bad for Zac Brown (Plus… exclusive goodies!)

I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for Zac Brown. I mean… not too sorry. The guy seemingly has fame and fortune, as evidenced by how many times he allegedly sold out Fenway Park, and the fact that he has a futuristic spear-fishing gun that appears to cost more than my entire annual salary. But I wonder if he is kinda bumming right now.

The reaction to his extended remix guest-starring spot on Survivor 50 was brutal. Fans were rightfully aghast that so much screen time was devoted to a celebrity fishing and giving his own confessionals — eating up screen time at an alarming rate during the most anticipated season ever. I say rightfully because we were recently assured all these celebrity angles that were teased extensively in the season trailer would not take the focus away from the players and the game we all came to see, yet that is exactly what it did. The dude got more screen time than an entire tribe, for crying out loud!

So Survivor nation pushed back… hard. Hopefully nobody was reading the replies on any CBS social media posts regarding the appearance, because it was an onslaught. It evidentially became IMDB’s lowest-rated Survivor episode ever (even with an epic blindside!). And fans have a right to be upset, especially after being told in the past how other things had been cut from the show (like the opening credits, jurors walking into Tribal Council, etc…) because every single second of air time was so precious. If that’s the case and every second of screen time is precious, then why are we watching so much freakin’ Zac Brown?!?

And yet even though I was critical of the decision, now I feel bad for Zac Brown. Here’s this guy who I guess was a big Survivor fan and gets the opportunity to be on one of his favorite shows, and now everyone is associating him with one of the worst creative decisions in franchise history. But none of this is really Zac Brown’s fault! Unless he insisted they air that completely needless segment of him fishing, or demanded they show multiple songs of his on the reward concert, this is really on the editors/producers.

As they do with the actual players in the game (who have 90 percent of their experience end up on the editing room floor), the producers should not have been hypnotized by the celebrity status and trimmed the obvious fat. Had they just cut out the Zac Brown spearfishing infomercial completely and taken the reward down to a single song, there would have be no outcry. No muss, no fuss. That would have been serving the viewer and not the celebrity. And now poor Zac Brown has to have his name attached to this mess forever. Or at least until MrBeast shows up.