Why a double tribal council?

If you watch Survivor and you're like me, you enjoy it when the producers and other outside forces basically sit back and let the competitors play the game. That means no tribe swaps, no unfair, out-of-nowhere advantages, and no double tribal councils. No spoilers, but last night had both tribes going to tribal council. Well, over at EW.com, Jeff Probst laid out in a very open, honest, and logical way why this is a necessary evil. I quite liked his explanation and thought I would share it here:

Let me explain why we have to have double tribal councils. When the show first started we had 16 contestants. That is still the perfect number if you want to vote one person out each week and have a final two scenario at the last tribal council. To be clear — we LOVE starting with sixteen people.

Here’s the problem. Over the years, contestants have become okay with quitting. After Osten did it back in the Pearl Islands, it became acceptable to quit. Well, a quit really screws us up because then we don’t have enough people to finish the season. So, in an effort to make sure the game can play fairly and without interruption, we started bringing more people.

If you bring 18 people, which we have done, you have to consider the fact that you’ll have an uneven number of men and women on each tribe.

So, that often leads you to bringing 20 people. Twenty people is great because even if people quit, you are okay because you brought more people than you needed.

The two problems with 20 people are:
1. It’s a lot of people for the audience to get to know.
2. At some point you have to get rid of the extra players.

That’s where the double tribal councils come into play. To keep it a bit more fair, we now offer everybody a chance to win individual immunity, so you do have a shot to keep yourself in the game. But obviously if you’re the one in trouble, then you hate this facet of the game.

So anytime we have 20 people you can expect to see at least one double-elimination at some point.