Survivor Gabon Premiere Tonight

Season 17 of Survivor begins this evening beginning at 8:00 on the East Coast. I hope you have a "smart" DVR, because it's on the schedule as running until 10:01, which means that it'll crash into the first minute of the "ER" premiere. (I seem to remember ABC pulling that stunt a lot for "Lost", making it tough to record whatever the hell I was watching next.)

I don't know about how this one will be the "best ever" or whatever, but I'm pretty sure we're going to find ourselves once again laughing at people who act as though they've never seen the show (and, as I understand it, some of them haven't), trying to cast themselves in certain roles and failing or worse, succeeding, and just generally turning into Human Train Wrecks. Fun times!

Watch this space for a detailed recap of the episode. I hope to be finished with it by the time the weekend's over. 

Survivor Previews Online and Off

There are a bunch of preview videos for Survivor Gabon over at Cnet TV.

The first one is the opening three-and-a-half minutes of the show, which would be the teaser, the opening credits and then maybe the first thirty seconds of the show itself, as the contestants schlep toward a welcoming Probst.

The next batch of videos appear to be mostly the same footage that's incorporated into the preview program that's been airing on TV Guide Network. The best part about watching the videos here is that you don't have to deal with watching Parvati Shallow standing in a zoo and trying to read the cue cards with nearly-cute jokes.

The first video is a tour of the Tribal Council set, along with a couple of weird stories regarding problems they had getting it built.

Next up is a "Castaway Preview", where Probst gives us his early impressions of this season's cast. This video is over seven minutes long and is broken into many pieces on the TVGN show.

Next is about three minutes of gorgeous footage from Gabon. Don't forget that this season is shot in High Definition, so it should be something to see. Speaking of which...

Finally there's a piece about the technical end of shooting the show in HD. Some of this footage, but not all of it, was in the TVGN preview. It's kind of interesting to see just how close the cameras and boom mikes are, sometimes.

Fair warning: a couple of the videos could be considered a little spoilery, since you do see the way the tribes are divided up, and a little bit of stuff from challenges, but there are no big secrets given up here.

There's footage in the TVGN preview that doesn't appear in the Cnet videos, so if you can deal with Parvati trying desperately to sound natural (not to mention the commercials), look it up. They're showing it about a million times between now and the 25th.

Cnet videos can be found here.