• by Paul Gough , May 8, 2003

The Amazon isn't shying away from the racy direction the CBS show has taken this season.

In an interview Thursday afternoon before the unscripted series' two-hour finale and one-hour reunion Sunday night, Jeff Probst acknowledged some concerns about the content this season. Two female contestants stripped on the seventh episode to get peanut butter and chocolate. (That and other nudity was pixilated.) But he also said it was one of the contestants ideas and said that and other things that happen in the show are used unapologetically for Survivor's promos and episodes to get good ratings.

"It was an odd thing. We are well aware there was some content that was not appropriate ... We don't want that every season but we can't ignore it," Probst said. He said that when you design a "$20 million adventure" and then turn it over to 16 people who don't care about the show and just want to win the $1 million prize, things happen. It was even more unpredictable this time around with the initial tribal segregation of men and women.

"We didn't set out to cast this show with nudity. We had no idea," Probst said. By comparison, he said, last year's Survivor: Thailand was boring and predictable because the final four contestants were "old enough not to do anything wacky."

Survivor: The Amazon has fared pretty well in the ratings in this its seventh incarnation. After a Feb. 20 episode with ratings of 13.5/20 and 23.33 million households - the highest ratings for a regular season episode since Survivor: Marquesas in March 2002 - it also earned its highest adults 18-49 rating since Survivor: Thailand premiered in September 2002. Last week's Survivor: The Amazon ranked 11th in the primetime Nielsens, with a 10.8/18 and 11.5 million viewers.

Probst said that from his perspective, Survivor: The Amazon, has been one of the CBS franchise's best seasons. "It's hard to ever quantify why but I think a lot of it has to do with the good characters lasting deep into the show," he said. He said that every series, there are three to five people who could function as heroines or villains or bring sex appeal and romance to Survivor if they last long enough. He said that this time around - with Rob, Heidi, Jenna, Matthew and Butch - there are compelling qualities to each, although he didn't think in the beginning that at least four of them would make it to the final four.

He said that the producers were pleased that the battle lines divided by gender had worked well - despite some nail-biting before shooting began - and disputed some of the critics' charges about unscripted (or reality) television. "We don't put words in anybody's mouth," Probst said. He said that, in the case of the two women volunteering to strip for access to peanut butter and chocolate, he was a "victim of editing" because the final cut seemed to make it seem like he couldn't serve the goodies fast enough when he said he let the contestants have 45 minutes to think about it first.

Probst does understand how some contestants could get upset by what ends up on the air. "It's hard for your entire essence to be filmed for 39 days" 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "They're miserable, you do get in bad moods ... And we use them, and we tease them and we make sure we're in big fat close-ups ... That's the social politics of the show."

Speaking specifically about the reunion show that will be broadcast live from New York's Central Park after Sunday's final episode, Probst said that he isn't obligated to give everyone a fair chance to talk about what happened and wavered on whether he would try. "I'm going with the show that's entertaining," he said.

He declined to discuss specifics on what the next run of Survivor was going to look like, although he said that the producers are constantly trying to find ways to fool the increasingly-savvy contestants. He paid homage to another hit unscripted show on rival network Fox, American Idol. He said he's curious to see what happens and "how it's going to find its legs," saying that American Idol is in the same situation that Survivor was after the Australian episodes.