Welcome to the Purple Rock Podcast’s coverage of Australian Survivor: Australia V The World. IT’S HAPPENING!!!!! The season that AU Survivor fans have been clamoring for for close to a decade is finally here! I assume there are some newbies to Club Aussie Survivor this season, given the presence of Cirie, Parvati, and Tony on the World tribe (and David Genat on the Aussie tribe, if you watched the most recent season of Deal or No Deal Island). If so, read on to find out how you can watch the show from outside Australia.

First some thoughts about the cast. TL;DR: nailed it! Cirie, Parvati, and Tony you know about, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they were the first three US players that casting reached out to. The Aussie Tribe is equally stacked: David, Shonee, George, Kirby and Luke are first-ballot AU Survivor Hall of Famers, and Janine and Sarah are very fine if less-obvious choices to bring back. The only obvious persons missing, IMO, are Hayley and  Feras. Hayley just had a kid, and in the case of Feras, a) they probably didn’t want to cast both him and Kirby, and if you have to choose one, Kirby is the one to cast; and b) which of David, George, or Luke do you drop in favor of Feras?

Among the neither-Aussie-nor-Americans, Lisa is by far the obvious person to choose from Survivor NZ, as is, to a slightly lesser extent, Rob from Survivor South Africa. That’s not to slight Rob, but rather because there are many, many South African Survivors who would be great to see again, but to my great surprise, they only had one South African slot. Instead, they chose to cast Tommi from Selviytyjät Suomi (Survivor Finland) and Kass from Survivor Québec. I know almost nothing about those two but evidently (and although I hate the formulation “foreign country’s X is like America’s Y”) Tommi is a Finnish Rob Cesternino and Kass is a Québécois Amanda Kimmel.

As you surely know, this is going to be a truncated, 14-player, 16-day season. They were never going to be able to corral 24 returnees to play a 47-day game, but even accepting that limitation, I have some doubts about how good a Survivor season such an accelerated game can produce. But I go in cautiously optimistic.

But that’s not going to stop this season from coming at us like a firehose as usual. There’s no official word as far as I know, but apparently there will be three episodes a week for four weeks, then a standalone finale in week 5. It’s quite a lot if you’ve only recently gotten used to 90-minute episodes of US Survivor, but we old hands at AU Survivor are dug in and ready to go (and to stay off social media from Sunday through Tuesday to avoid spoilers).

For those outside of Australia in need of assistance in watching AU Survivor, there are a number of dodgy ways to do it but also a more-or-less aboveboard way (as always, I beg the powers-that-be to put AU Survivor on US Paramount+ or something similar—take my money!). Although with this method you do have to sit through Australian commercials.

1. Install a VPN on your computer if you don’t already have one
2. Set the region to Australia
3. Go to 10Play , the streaming home of Australian Survivor
4. Sign up for a free 10Play account (click on “Sign In” and then “Sign Up”)
5. Enjoy!