Exactly. The show’s a one word oxymoron, though that doesn’t stop me from watching the damn thing.
Note: I added what I presume you intended your quote to me. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
It’s supposed to draw its inspiration from Lord of the Flies. If that’s the case, make it more like LotF and have people raiding each others camps. One person has a pair of glasses which can start a fire and the tribes will have to steal them as needed. If someone gets killed by a big falling boulder or a large fire, oh well, they were not the ultimate survivor.
I’m not a big fan of the show but my wife is and I can understand why people would like it. (I’m not thread crapper) The reason it’s become boring is because you’ve seen it before. The first year or two it was something new and exciting but now it’s old hat.
I suppose they could try more outrageous stunts and attempt to get more people that won’t get along with one another.
And miss out on some hot survivor chicks in skimpy outfits? I think not.
That might be pretty neat. Or just give them a goal and let them figure out how to acomplish it any way they can. (Like get 10 coconuts off the tree)
Marc
I don’t want to sound like I’m crapping on the thread; really, I’m just giving my two cents and all…
I think that Survivor is to survival is as Ashlee Simpson is to music. The fake-ness is far too obvious for any discerning viewer to endure.
All this immunity, voting off the island and little rewards of modern conveniences taints the competitive aspect of it. Plus it’s really quite painful to watch idiots struggle with basic concepts. And I really, really, really don’t want to hear about who said what about who and who’s just such a totally conniving biotch, etc.
My idea for saving the show is for it to “get real”. Really good competitors, pure competition, real survival challenges. The person who is the best wins, and it’s not up to the other contestants or the show’s producers. It would be nice if the competitions were taped live, no manufactured continuity.
Then they could say they’re the “real” Survivor; all those other shows are just badly written soap operas.
Two more ideas that popped into my head during snoozetime this morning:
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Have all Survivors live on the beach the entire 39 days, regardless of whether they’ve been voted out. How bad would it suck for the people doing the voting if the person they eliminated from winning contention had to come back to camp with them? No more casting votes for people who are weak/tired/just want to go home (like Osten from the Pearl Islands), because they’re going to have to stick around with you even after they’re out of the running. Potential here for high drama.
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Change the show to allow real-time audience voting, maybe giving the top vote-getter from the audience one additional vote during TC. I’m sure this would be complicated to pull off, but they do nearly instant web voting on Star Search, with the results tabulated during a commercial break, so I know it’s possible. It’s worth a shot.
I like a lot of the ideas in this thread, especially starting as one tribe (no merge) and competing for individual immunity from the beginning.
Other things I’d like to see:
Tribal council voting not private. Contestants have to cast their vote aloud. I think this would make strategizing more difficult, and some of the fun may be taken away (like when Lex suspected the wrong person of giving him a vote). However, I also think the unpredictability could make it interesting. For example, player 1 is upset with player 2 and votes for player 2, player 2 gives a retaliation vote (possibly throwing previous plan out the window). Players 3 and 4 (in an alliance with player 2), change their vote as well.
Since an open TC may change a majority vote depending upon who votes first, player with immunity chooses order of voting.
All booted players make up the jury.
No contestant allowed to sit out a challenge due to uneven numbers. Instead, have the challenge be individually based, like the one Shii-ann won with the bucket and the chain on her wrist.
Along the same lines, make the majority of challenges individual rather than a team effort. More standing on platforms above water, last person standing wins (outlast). So that older players have a fighting chance, an equal amount of mental individual challenges as well (outwit).
Booted players are allowed to watch game before casting their vote. Will still probably get a sour grapes jury, but an informed jury, too.
This would be the most boring show on television. The final result would be projected to the audience by week 3. There’s a name for winners of real survival challenges, we call them Marines.
The one thing that Survivor detractors just don’t understand: **People do not watch Survivor for the survival elements! ** They watch it for the gaming strategy elements, i.e. the backstabbing, the drama and the conniving. The survival aspect just adds a minor wild card to the equation.
The reason it’s become boring: tribes immediately break into alliances, often along demographic lines–young vs old, male vs female. So the first 8 weeks we just watch the minority getting picked off. It doesn’t get interesting until the majority has to turn on each other.
The solution? I dunno…cast all 18 contestants from the same demographic? Eighteen 40-year-old Asian males? Naaahhhh…
But I like the one tribe solution, and the instantaneous TC.
I understand only too well that some people like their soaps…but the question is how to fix Survivor. My answer was to make it real, because while many people like the soap opera aspect of it, many people tuned out once they sussed out that there is no game at all; it’s jacked. A similar schism exists between fans and non-fans of soap operas: non-fans dislike them becuase it’s not realistic or even a realistic fantasy that some twenty-something chick goes through 10 marriages and 5 uncurable diseases in a season and still looks like she stepped off a runway in Milan. Fans think it’s boring for some twenty-something chick to NOT go through 10 marriages and 5 uncurable diseases in a season and still look like she stepped off a runway in Milan.
Potayto - Potahto.
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It should be made alot more about surviving. Like the OP said, challenges should be about surviving. The first to make first wins the first challenge.
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There is no way you can take out tribal councils. The entire point of the game is the dynamic created by the politics.
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Get more interesting people. Burnett claims that everyone chosen is a leader, which is so obviously not the case. The people are just so generic and boring. Let’s get REAL leaders who have know no other position than leader and see what happens. Get 8 people on a tribe who all have to do things their way.
Doesn’t Burnett do the casting for Apprentice? He could certainly dip into that pool for leaders.
Okay, i’ll play nice this time 
make the show true to it’s name, survivor, not survive and get toys that make the show easier
for example, drop the cast into a tropical lagoon with the “wreckage” of a ship, they have to salvage what they can from the wreckage, (contents of wreckage determined at random) and use it to live off the land, those contestants that fall ill or are unable to hold their own are removed from the island as they “perish”
(they’ll actually be removed from the island if they get badly ill so they can get medical treatment, but they won’t be back)
the whole concept here is to live off the land
a more evil version would be to drop the contestants in a remote location with nothing but a swiss-army knife, no supplies, nothing, they’ll truly have to live off the land
there, is that better?, just make the show true to it’s name
Thank you, MacTech. 
I just had a thought of why this season might be so boring–too many people are pursuing a “flying under the radar” strategy. It’s a really effective strategy for making it to the endgame, so it’s understandable why more and more people may be using it. But it makes for really boring TV.
So, one way to improve Survivor would be to change things up in such a way as to ensure that there is no benefit to flying under the radar. In fact, make it so that being really boring and nondescript actually hurts your chances to stay in the game.
Now, how exactly you would do this, I don’t know. But if it could be done, it might really help.