‘Survivor’: What We Know About the 41st Season on CBS

The first fall without a Survivor season has come and gone for the first time in two decades due to the coronavirus, which has shut down countless production on TV shows and movies since spreading uncontrolled throughout the U.S. in March. While Season 41 of the long-running CBS reality show originally had a September 2020 premiere date, travel to Fiji was halted due to safety restrictions, pushing that date, as well as the production of Season 42 back indefinitely.

“Though Fiji has no reported cases and is beautifully remote, our crew numbers over 400 and are flying in from over 20 different countries, creating a need for more time to fully analyze and create our new production safety plan,” Probst said in a statement to the cast and crew after the show was bumped from the fall schedule in July. “The situation is unprecedented and we are learning more information every day. It is out of concern for the well-being of all of you that we have taken this step.”

Production has reportedly been pushed back to Spring 2021, as per Inside Survivor, as Fiji’s borders currently remain closed amid the global pandemic. CBS reportedly plans to film the next three seasons back-to-back at that time, leading to season premiere dates in summer 2021, fall 2021, and spring 2022. “[It’s] going to be a little more complicated because we literally have to navigate some international waters,” CBS Entertainment President Kelly Kahl previously Deadline.

While other CBS reality shows, such as Love Island, were able to shoot within a filming bubble, travel to Fiji has become an integral part of Survivor. Probst said that the Fiji government wants production to resume whenever it is safe. “They have figured out how to handle [the pandemic], and they just want to ensure that when we come to shoot there, we don’t change that,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re working together with them, but they’ve been very production-friendly in terms of wanting it to happen.”

The COVID-19 pandemic even affected the end of Season 40 of Survivor, which had its jury results read at a virtual finale Probst hosted from his own garage. “That was really fun. It became a question of, ‘How are we going to do it?’ And our art department threw out the idea, ‘What if we built a mini tribal council and just shipped it to you — like a Lego set — and you put it together in your garage?’” Probst told THR. Disclosure: PopCulture is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of ViacomCBS.