Last night Wendell Holland was named the winner of Survivor 2018 Ghost Island, and at the end of the finale Jeff Probst revealed to us that the next season will be called Survivor: David vs. Goliath.
The next Survivor 2018 will premiere in September and David vs. Goliath will pit underdogs against the big dogs. So it’s basically, soft, humble folk against out-front people who have excelled in their areas of work and expertise. This should be interesting.
As we heard during the preview last night, this is how the cast will be broken down:
The Davids, 10 strangers who share one thing in common: overcoming adversity. It’s the only thing they’ve known The Goliaths: 10 strangers who also share one thing in common: capitalizing on their advantage and using it to squash their opponents.
Jeff Probst tells Entertainment Weekly that they didn’t really have this idea until after the casting process started. So it was people auditioning who actually put the theme in motion.
Usually we don’t really have an idea at first and we just start to see what’s there and we typically [figure out the theme] the month before. But we just never got to it this season. And then I remember a day when this guy Christian came in, and he told us his story which was that he was always a bit of a nerd when he was a kid, and he had to overcome social awkwardness his entire life. He was picked on, and you can see it in how he carries himself, his body language — it’s almost like he has to get permission before he speaks.
So he was, in many ways, this personification of a David. He had been overcoming obstacles his entire life. And what nobody would ever suspect is that he was now a robotics engineer, and in the right situation that intelligence and that education could be his secret weapon. And then we had a guy that was the polar opposite. This guy that’s known as Johnny Mundo [a.k.a. John Morrison], the mayor of Slamtown. He’s a professional wrestler, he’s gigantic, he’s charming, and he’s smart. He started with advantage, he had a great family, and he’s used all of these skills to slay everybody his entire life.
So we looked at those two and went, we might be at a point where we could actually commit to this because the big risk is feeling enough confidence in the format and the idea to pit these seemingly lopsided groups against each other. The theme that we kept coming back to is: When you are on the island and you don’t know what to expect, it doesn’t matter whether you were born with your advantage or had to work for it, because everybody knows that every David has a secret weapon and every Goliath certainly has their Achilles heel, and that’s what Survivor will bring out. It will bring you to your knees and it will lift you to your highest heights. It’s all about context and situation and how you respond.
What do you think of the theme for the next season of Survivor?
