Five ‘Survivor’ Contestants Battle for the Big Prize

Season 45 of Survivor has its finale December 20 on CBS and Paramount Plus, with five contestants still in the running. The finale goes for two hours, and Jeff Probst hosts the one-hour aftershow.

Still in the hunt for the $1 million prize are Jake O’Kane, an attorney in Boston; Katurah Topps, an attorney in Brooklyn; Austin Li Coon, a grad student in Chicago; Dee Valladares, a Miami entrepreneur; and Julie Alley, an attorney in Brentwood, Tennessee.

Probst is the Survivor host and an executive producer with Mark Burnett, Matt VanWagenen, Kahaia Pearson and Jesse Jensen.

Season 45 kicked off September 27, as 18 castaways gathered in Fiji with an eye on the million bucks. For the first time, Survivor has featured 90-minute episodes all season long. Probst told B+C he had wished for longer episodes for years. “I’ve actually been pitching CBS to let us experiment with 90-minute episodes for the last several years because we always felt like 90 minutes would be a sweet spot for us,” he said. “When we get a first cut done for a 60-minute episode, we’re always 10 to 12 minutes heavy, which is a lot. And that’s after we’ve already cut stuff down. So we were hopeful that one day we could try this.”