Who to watch—and watch out for—on this season of Survivor

CBS is preparing to launch its 44th season of Survivor tonight, which is an achievement that would be slightly more impressive if the network hadn’t been averaging two seasons every year for 20 years (Survivor has not really been on since the ’70s), but is there anything keeping the show relevant these days beyond pure momentum? Survivor recently moved on from gimmicky seasons with a central premise—like the insufferable concept of Millennials vs. Gen X or the more galaxy-brained Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers—which makes it pretty clear what the real point of the show is supposed to be: the contestants. It doesn’t matter who is a hero or a healer or a hustler, what matters is that this person is on Survivor, and you (in theory) want to see what happens to them.

Looking at this year’s crop of contestants, the thing that unites nearly all of them is that they’re all admitted fans of Survivor, and that alone should forcibly upend the premise of the show and make it into the game that its best players have always seen it as. Essentially, everyone coming into Survivor now has to either play like Boston Rob Mariano—a master manipulator and the greatest to ever play the game, precisely because it was a game to him—or explicitly not play it like him and just be there to be there.

Though it seems to almost exclusively contain engineers and hair stylists, the season 44 cast is full of aspiring Boston Robs. For example, there’s Frannie, a “research coordinator” who says she thrives on having a million things happening at once. She says people will think she’s always buzzing around, unable to focus, but she claims in her introduction video that thinking like that actually helps her concentrate. She describes herself as “zesty” and says she’s planning to stab people in the back and be mean to them for fun, which is a great attitude to go into Survivor with. Too many of these shows are about nice people who want to be nice, which … does sometimes work on Survivor, to be fair. It’s just not as fun to watch.

The other side of Frannie’s coin is a guy named Kane who seems exhausting. His career is listed as “law student,” but he graduated, so doesn’t that just make him as unemployed as anyone else without a job? At least some of the competition has the decency to completely make up stupid jobs (shoutout to Helen, a “product manager” who explains that being a product manager means having all of the ideas but none of the power to make them happen, which also sounds similar to being unemployed). The worst thing about Kane, though, is that he says he’s not in this game to win the $1 million, since he’s young and still has “lots of ways” to get a million dollars. Maybe start with updating your LinkedIn, buddy.

Speaking of young people, there are plenty of them here: One who doesn’t seem especially exciting is Matt, a “security software engineer” who describes his job as being “like a digital bank robber” as if that will help him at all on Survivor (are there a lot of salmon ladders in that business?). But then there’s Carson, who is a little too proud of the fact that he’s a NASA engineering student, which literally makes him a rocket scientist, but he notes in his intro that the show is older than he is and he’s excited to try being a “puppet master.” Boston Rob would be proud, even though he would probably stuff this kid into a locker.

Another good young person is Maddy, who listed her career as “charity projects manager” but actually quit her job as a CEO assistant so she could be on Survivor. That alone should win her a few points, because CEOs are bad (that goes double for the contestant who introduces herself as “venture capitalist,” the worst job you can have on the whole planet) and it’s good that there’s at least one CEO out there who maybe had to answer their own phones and respond to their own emails for a bit, but also Maddy is going in with a plan to survive until the tribe’s merge and then make a feminist stand by kicking everyone’s asses and proving that a woman can win Survivor on raw power and not just by playing a good social game.

But this isn’t some kind of absurd “Millennials vs. Gen X” game, as there are also some good regular adults in the batch. There’s Heidi, who moved to the U.S. from Puerto Rico and wants to “carve a path for people who sound different and look different,” which is a nice example of somebody who just wants to be there, but two of the most potentially exciting contestants are a guy named Josh and a guy named Brandon. Josh is a surgical podiatrist who notes in his intro video that surgeons always have to be ready for the unexpected (which should be a chilling note for anyone who ever undergoes surgery and assumes that their doctor knows what they’re doing), but he also says he’s not going to tell anyone what his real job is and just let them assume he’s a normal buff dude—a classic reality show strategy, even if it’s always more fun for the player than the viewer.

Brandon, meanwhile, might as well be a self-insert character by somebody writing Survivor fan-fiction. He’s another buff dude, but also he plays piano. And he does magic. And he’s a pilot. And he briefly played for the Seattle Seahawks. Hell yeah, guy! Throw a few more on there: Tell the people you coined the phrase “pardon my French.” Say that you told Mark Zuckerberg to drop the “the” and make it cleaner. Shit, just start saying in your talking-head videos that you won season 44 of Survivor and see if anyone calls you on it.

Most of these contestants are either explicitly going into the game with ideas for how to play, and not just by saying “I’m going to access inner strength and be better than everyone!” or they’re very much not doing that and going in with no preconceived notions about how well they’ll do. You either have the one strategy—stab people in the back and have fun doing it—or you don’t have a strategy at all. This early in the game, before we’ve even seen the contestants meet each other, it’s impossible to say which one will be successful, but a lot of back-stabbing should at least be fun to watch.