“Survivor” and “Amazing Race ”to continue with 90-minute episodes in 2024
CBS also announces premiere dates for the longtime reality competition shows, and some two-hour episodes as well.
CBS has revealed their premiere dates and primetime schedule for winter 2024. And while the announcement was filled with big news, like the new Justin Hartley drama Tracker debuting in the coveted post-Super Bowl spot on Feb. 11, reality TV fans will be happy to see the continuation of some super-sizing on two of the network’s long-running competition programs.
Survivor and The Amazing Race have been airing 90-minute episodes all fall as the network used the extended run-times to help compensate for a lack of scripted program during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. With both strikes now settled, the question became: When would those comedies and dramas make it back on the schedule? And would Survivor and The Amazing Race continue to be supersized? We now have our answer.
Not only is Survivor not going back to an hour, but the first two episodes of next season will actually be two-hours long. Survivor 46 will start on Feb. 28 with a two-hour premiere. After a second two-hour show on March 6, Survivor will return to 90-minute episodes for the rest of the season on March 13, when it will once again be paired with 90-minute installments of The Amazing Race, which premieres that night.
While the current Survivor 45 was specifically filmed to air at a 90-minute length due to the possibility of strikes disrupting the fall broadcast schedule, Survivor 46 was shot without knowledge of how long the episodes would end up being. “I was optimistic that 45 would work and that maybe CBS would say, ‘Okay, we like it. We wish we had shot 46 for 90 minutes,” Probst told EW in September. “So all of the producers in every department knew to just be thinking of 90 minutes while we’re out there, and if you see an opportunity for a deeper story or you have an idea that we could add into something that’s already in our game design, let’s talk about it, and if we can pull it off from a production standpoint, let’s do it.”
However, as Probst explained then, that also meant producers could not specifically add creative wrinkles to the show that they could not afford to lose in an edit should the episodes end up just being an hour: “The challenge became: We can’t create things and put them in the show without the possibility that we can then cut them out of the show. So we have to reverse engineer in the other direction. What can we do if we don’t have time to show it where we could lose it and it wouldn’t impact the central dramatic question of who is going home. We had a lot of fun with that. So that’s my way of saying if CBS comes and says, ‘Okay, maybe we will keep it for 46,’ we’d be ready to take that on.”
The Amazing Race is in a similar boat. The currently airing season 35 of the show was actually the 36th season filmed. CBS kept the original season 35 in the vault specifically because it was not filmed with 90-minutes in mind, so they flip-flopped seasons 35 and 36. But now, starting on March 13, the original season 35 will air as season 36 as 90-minutes anyway.
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