Survivor and The Amazing Race moving to 90-minute episodes this fall

Dalton Ross
·3 min read
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Survivor and The Amazing Race moving to 90-minute episodes this fall
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Survivors ready… GO! And keep going.

CBS has announced that two popular, longtime reality competition franchises will be supersized this fall. Survivor and The Amazing Race will air 90-minute episodes on Wednesday nights all season, instead of their customary hour-long installments. Survivor will air from 8-9:30pmET while The Amazing Race will follow from 9:30-11pmET.

The move helps protect the CBS schedule in the event that the current writers' strike continues into and through the summer, when writers' rooms on network shows are normally in full swing. The last writers' strike in 2007-2008 lasted 100 days, and there is belief among some that the current work stoppage could go even longer.

Helen Li and Jeff Probst on "Survivor 44'
Helen Li and Jeff Probst on "Survivor 44'

Robert Voets/CBS Helen Li and Jeff Probst on "Survivor 44'

Fans — and many in production — have long clamored for extended Survivor episodes. CBS has experimented in the past by occasionally airing 90-minute installments and two episodes back-to-back in a two-hour block. On Sept. 28 last fall, the network gave a preview of things to come by airing 90-minute episodes of Survivor and The Amazing Race together. The 35th season of The Amazing Race, which will air in the fall, was shot last year, while Survivor 45 is currently filming in Fiji.

While both shows always have plenty of extra material — Survivor shoots 24 hours a day — it will be interesting to see if there are any format changes to either series to account for the extra time now available on screen. For example, will Survivor start staging more reward challenges now that they have approximately 20 more minutes of non-commercial time to play with?

Phil Keoghan on 'The Amazing Race'
Phil Keoghan on 'The Amazing Race'

Michele Crowe/CBS Phil Keoghan on 'The Amazing Race'

These are not likely to be the last moves made by network reality TV if the writers' strike continues. Disney has already announced that Dancing with the Stars is heading back to ABC, and there is always the possibility of the ultimate schedule-filler coming into play. That would be Big Brother, which in its 23-year history on CBS has aired anywhere from three to six times a week. During the last writers' strike, the network rushed a special spring season onto the schedule to help fill gaps, and there is also the chance of another celebrity edition of the show, which CBS has aired three times.

But even without the writers' strike, the move to longer Survivor and Amazing Race episodes makes scheduling sense. In its currently airing 44th season, Survivor remains Wednesday night's highest-rated program in the advertiser-friendly 18-49 demographic, and The Amazing Race has been a solid, if unspectacular, performer throughout the years, even as CBS has moved it around its schedule into different seasons of the year and different nights of the week. If the shows perform well in the fall at their new extended runtimes, the move to 90 minutes could be permanent.

For Survivor fans, to have that extra footage given and then taken away would be perhaps the most devastating blindside of all.

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