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Bowie wrote:

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I really think the series has overdone the Pacific Islands (apart from Guatemala, Seasons 7-14, anyone?) and I seriously doubt Cook Islands will make it the 10th time out of 20 seasons. Way too much. I know the producers felt the show was lulling a bit from S3-6, but there was definitely an aura about the locales of those seasons unsurpassed until China, well, at least in my opinion.

So why not, after a summery island season 19, set Survivor 20 in North America?

S20 will be filming in October-December '09 so that's late fall-winter so they could either go all-out and do it in Alaska where it will be the first cold/winter season ever, or perhaps set it in a remote and warmer location like -- I guess -- Texas, Alabama or Florida, or in a famous national park location, pending the rights to film, such as the Grand Canyon (which is obviously the most unlikely of all options).

The title would be awesome, like,: 'Survivor in the Homeland' or 'Survivor: Stateside', or to be less political-sounding, something like 'Survivor: Origins,' 'Survivor: Natives' or simply 'Survivor: Alaska' or wherever it is. Ratings would be immense.

They could even make a point and set it in an actual city (that none of the contestants live in), drawing parallels between surviving the wild and the urban life -- although, yes, I am aware that this is VERRRRY unlikely and controversial, and would make filming practically impossible (or would it?), but hey, just putting it out there.

There are also SO many twists to the format left ripe for the picking. Like, I've always wanted the Jury to be an even bigger part of the game -- could it begin on day one (well, day three I guess) and ALL eliminated contestants get to be jury members? Could the *jury* vote out players (i.e., sooner than the final 2 (or 3))? Could the jury become a new tribe? Or do we still need a jury at all? Should "twists" (and the general rules of the game, if revised) be given to the players from the outset? Do there even need to be tribes any more? If so, do they have to merge at all? Are immunity challenges a thing of the past? What if all players were on the same tribe to begin with, but were given the tools and means to set off and make their own tribes at their own discretion, whether split evenly or according to personal differences, whether a group of 7 or 8 or even just 1 person? They could choose to call "tribal wars" between another tribe (or tribes), causing assassinations of certain players from opposing teams rather than vote-outs. In this way, the actual format of the game would be left more to the players, and there wouldn't necessarily be a predictable 3-day-cycle to episodes and challenges. The point being, it would resemble ACTUAL tribal survival, and tribe members actually had significant power over what they did to survive. Feasts could be rewarded to tribes who kill off (err.. cannibalize?) other players in tribal wars, so that would be the encouragement to form individual tribes. Just a bunch of wild ideas that still retain the integral themes of the game of Survivor.

If it's an all-stars, they could bring 1 player back from each season (18 players if you exclude any repeat players from S8: All-Stars), although I have a feeling they'll go for 20 players somehow, you know, for Season *20*. However many it is, it would suck if it was 6-7 players from each of the recent 3 seasons, Gabon, Tocantins and Samoa.

The alternative is to have ONE PLAYER FROM EVERY STATE! 50 players divided into, say, 5 teams of 10 states: something along the lines of the Pacific States, Rocky Mountains States, The Great Lakes States, The Southern States, and New England States (yeah I know this doesn't divide technically or precisely very well but it doesn't matter that much) and they could each be named after Native American tribal names related to their respective areas. It wouldn't be too hard to knock out a whole heap of states toward the beginning (maybe at the get-go, in a 2-hour premiere, each tribe votes out 2 players/states in the first half hour, leaving us with 40, then all tribes go to tribal council and vote out another 2 players, leaving us with 30 then in the next episode it's down to 20 pretty quick and the game can get more intimate). The temptation would be to do this all live and have some sort of live voting thing, but that would be a bit too far from the Survivor format, obviously.