Washington’s Shannon ‘Shambo’ Waters, castmates reflect on ‘emotional and psychological’ toll of ‘Survivor’ as 50th season premieres

The reunion was an eruption of joy.

Ahead of Wednesday’s debut of “Survivor” Season 50, the juggernaut reality competition show credited for transforming the television industry, Washington-based former player Shannon “Shambo” Waters convened with tribemates Russell Swan, Ashley Arcaro and Erik Cardona on a Zoom call Sunday with The Spokesman-Review.

Unlike Waters’ iconic mullet, which she still sports, it was party first and business second. Before recounting horror stories of coconut crab attacks and mud wrestling, or reflecting on the personal and cultural impacts of the long-running show, the group reveled in each other’s company.

“Is that baby Ashley?” Swan said with a smile.

“I’m definitely not a baby anymore,” Arcaro, now a mother of two, replied.

“Look at Chief’s head, I think he shined it for us,” Waters joked, using her nickname for Swan, who has since lost his own signature ’do.

“My follicles became age-challenged,” he replied.

Few shows have endured in American media like CBS’s “Survivor,” which first graced screens nearly 26 years ago. Hosted by Seattle Pacific University alum Jeff Probst, more than 750 adventure seekers from across the country have shed their normal lives to suffer in tropical paradises for the chance to bring home $1 million in pre-tax prize money.

Around a dozen of those contestants hail from Washington, including current state Attorney General Nick Brown, who competed on Season 2 in the Australian outback as a 23-year-old law student.

With seasons flying out at a rate of two per year, it can be hard to key in on the standouts. However, Season 19, which featured Washington-raised Waters, still floats toward the top.

To hear Waters and the crew tell it, there were real anxieties about the future of the franchise as they got underway with their “Survivor” experience. It was reported at the time Probst was looking to land his own talk show, ratings were on the decline and Season 20 was just around the corner, marking 10 years of the show, a good round number to hang a hat on.

As a result, production seemed to throw a lot at the wall in the name of good television. In a stroke of good fortune, the cast featured engaging characters like Shambo, as well as the debut of “Survivor” villain Russell Hantz, who’s vicious gameplay remains top of mind for contestants and his Season 19 peers, 17 years later.

Arcaro said the season’s cast has mostly gone its separate ways since filming ended.

“Because of the way that Russell screwed a lot of us over and the way he talked about all of us,” Arcaro said. “I think it just made our relationships really messy and weird, and we didn’t stay connected.”

Hantz is best known for the chaos he inflicted on his fellow tribemates, including burning their socks and emptying their canteens while they slept. He lied his way through alliance after alliance, repeatedly backstabbing his bedfellows to advance .

Hantz made for good television, highlighted by his invitation to participate in three more seasons since he, Waters and company crossed paths. Cardona said much of their season was dysfunctional misery, due in no small part to Hantz.

“They had never seen anything like that before,” Cardona said. “… And the producers loved it, right, obviously, because it’s great TV and it was miserable out there. And the producers love that too, because, shy of quitting, if you’re sad and you’re depressed and you’re hungry and you’re starving and you’re freaking out, that’s good TV.”

The tie holding those who appeared on Season 19 together, in many cases, is Waters. Her gregarious nature is as prevalent now as it was back then. She rattled off names of who she still speaks with, including Hantz, and recounted reunions with former tribemates in their home cities, or for her 60th birthday in Washington.

In organizing the interview, her former co-contestants named her as a main reason for agreeing to a lengthy group interview held over Zoom.

“Sham is so good about keeping that relationship going and continuing that relationship in terms of phone calls and text messages, and we do Christmas cards every year,” Arcaro said.

Raised in Renton, Washington, Waters has since relocated elsewhere in the Evergreen State. The former Marine still sports her signature mullet, enjoys getting outdoors and believes strongly in “lifting others up,” just as she tried to do during her time on the show, where she spearhunted fish, hauled water and fought, literally, in challenges.

“I think anybody that’s affiliated with ‘Survivor’ needs to learn to lift people up,” Waters said. “Because everybody has a skill, a resource, a commonality that maybe the other guy next to you doesn’t have, and if you just give freely of your life knowledge, you can always lift people up.”

A guy walks into a bar, and comes out cast on ‘Survivor’

All these years later, Waters still balks at how her season of reality TV came together. She said she was just one of four contestants on that season who applied; the rest were recruited by members of the production team. She learned she’d be paid for appearing on the show, regardless of whether she won, through a conversation with Swan about four days into filming, she said.

“This was just something that a bunch of my friends were like, ‘You got to go on ‘Survivor,’ Shannon, you’d do great,’ ” she recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Not with my big mouth, they’re gonna hate me, man.’ And I’m gonna have all these young kids. The only thing I’m probably gonna have in common with them is being a jock and being a good outdoors person.”

Arcaro was a fan, but applied to be on fellow CBS hit reality competition show “The Amazing Race.” She was asked to be an alternate for Season 19 of “Survivor” just a week before the selected cast mates were sent to fly out to Samoa.

Cardona was one of those head-hunted for the show, and like Arcaro, was asked to be an alternate shortly before the season got underway. As he recalls, he was walking down the street in Santa Monica, California, when he locked eyes with a woman. That woman ended up being one of the casting directors.

“I thought it was like a love at first sight thing, and she was not looking at me the same way,” Cardona said. “She was looking at me like a piece of meat or something. … She was like, ‘Do you think you could play ‘Survivor’?’ And I was like, ‘Well, that’s not what I was expecting, but you have no idea the most perfect person you asked that question to.’ ”

Cardona and Arcaro made it onto the show at the last minute, after production opted to use the budget for the family visit that usually occurs with the final few contestants to grow the cast to 20, instead of the planned 18.

Swan shares her passion for the competition . He applied 10 times before landing his spot, sometimes spending months in interviews working his way through the casting process. Swan began watching the show during the debut season, which featured fellow two-time contestant Gervase Peterson. Swan said the two knew each other casually from their upbringings in the Philadelphia area.

“I’m like, what is this brother doing running around on a damn island? What the hell is this naked white guy doing?” Swan said, referring to Season 1 winner Richard Hatch.

Swan was hooked. As the debut season came to an end, he heard Probst’s perennial invitation to apply to be on the show.

“He didn’t even get the sentence out, and I went to my typewriter because, you know, we were still typing documents, and I got the big camcorder with this thing called a VHS tape, and I set the camera up, and I can’t even remember what I recorded, and I fired this thing off,” Swan said.

Waters lasted the longest of the group that reunited Sunday; Arcaro exited on day 14 after being misled by Hantz, the season’s villain. Cardona exited on day 21, and Swan’s departure on day 10 is regarded as one of the most serious medical evacuations in the show’s history. Waters suffered the same fate as Arcaro on day 36, placing sixth overall, after helping Hantz eliminate all of her former tribemates.

Waters said her exit highlights the ultimate deciding factor in one’s “Survivor” performance: “Who you are in the game with.”

“Everybody thinks they’re these ‘Survivor’ know-it-alls from watching it for 50 seasons,” Waters said. “It’s laughable to me, because with human beings, every single human is different. And all these civilians that come up to us, people that haven’t played, are certain, like ‘No, you don’t understand. I could win it.’ And I’m like, ‘You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.’ ”

Surviving the torment

Waters said time spent in the Marines partially prepared her for the island, but she also studied survivalist Bear Grylls, who hosted the TV show “Man vs. Wild.” Skills like gathering food, mostly coconuts and kiwis, or hunting massive coconut crabs came in especially handy, since contestants weren’t provided rations of rice like on previous and future seasons.

While she’s still close with many castmates from her season, memories of the “bullying” also endure, she said. Another player burned her shoes six days into what would be 30 on the island, and she struggled to gel with the younger women in her tribe, in what she describes as being singled out by a high school-esque clique.

There was also the physical trauma of simulating being stranded on a deserted isle, with insufficient food, water that needs boiling and tropical storms. Frequent deluges left some players, including Waters and Swan, with trench foot and hand. Waters still has the scars in her hands.

She dislocated a vertebra in her neck, an injury that wasn’t shown on camera and took extensive physical therapy to recover from once she came home. Many players suffered from organ issues from the weeks without enough food and water; Waters said she couldn’t eat solids for three weeks after leaving the island. An eye injury also took weeks to recover from, she said, leaving her vision blurry for a time.

“The worst thing wasn’t the game, like (Swan) said, it was coming home,” Waters said. “I was, like, 131 pounds. I weighed that when I was 11. Are you freaking kidding me? Every bit of muscle on my body was eaten for protein during the show.”

All players said 17 years later and thousands of miles from Samoa, they still hate when it rains. Arcaro’s skin crawls when she’s in a wet bathing suit.

“It’s emotional and it’s psychological …,” Cardona said. “It only takes seconds for your brain to rewire itself, whether that’s a bonding thing, whether that’s a trauma thing, whether that’s a food source thing.”

Nutritional deprivation was coupled with recurring challenges in the form of wrestling matches, obstacle courses and long stints holding painful positions with the hopes of earning rewards or immunity from being voted off the island.

There have been 20 instances in the show’s history where a contestant had to be removed from the game for medical reasons because of the show’s extreme conditions. Two occurred in Season 19. One involved Swan.

“Still to this day, I have no real memory of that day,” Swan said.

On the 15th day of competition during a challenge, Swan collapsed unexpectedly from dehydration, repeatedly falling unconscious and prompting a response from the show’s onsite medical crew. His heart rate and blood pressure dropped dangerously low, medics said on camera.

Players said there was real panic from producers and medics at this moment, even fearing for Swan’s life. Contestants were herded away from the scene, they said, heading back to camp unsure whether Swan would survive, until producers told them the team had decided to remove Swan for his safety.

Three years later, he appeared again on “Survivor” for a season filmed in the Philippines as a sort of poetic return to his unceremonious departure from Samoa.

“I was a man that got carried off the battlefield on his back, and that screwed with my head for years,” Swan said. “I thought going back on the show would help redeem that or fix that, but that wasn’t the answer; that was just more toxicity.”

Instead of a satisfying conclusion to his “Survivor” journey, Swan immediately returned to the poor mental headspace that surrounded him in Samoa. While it may seem like “just a TV show” to its millions of viewers, “Survivor” has a way of getting inside its players’ heads, Cardona said.

“The trauma and stuff that happens in your life, the single thing that you’re the most afraid of” comes out on the island.

“The island reveals. It really, really does,” Cardona said.

For Cardona, that fear was betrayal. He set a record for being the player with the most votes cast against him in a single night when he didn’t see a blindside coming. Swan’s brush with death, forced departure and unsuccessful return to the show brought compounding feelings of failure.

“I was just that little boy that was told that he wasn’t anything, would never amount to anything,” Swan said. “I basically showed up in Samoa, and I thought the prophecy was fulfilled, that ultimately I am just a loser.”

‘Without the skeleton, there is no body’

The game’s changed a lot since Waters, Swan, Arcaro and Cardona played “Survivor.” Season 40 marked the start of what CBS and Probst are calling the “New Era,” which features a shortened competition from 39 days to 26, new advantages, competitions and younger casting.

Longtime fans have criticized the new format for doing away with some of the hardship, the varying locations or for the new twists that can be confusing and alienating. Waters said she does not fault the shortened season; she never returned to the show, despite invitations to do so, because of the toll it took on her body.

“I mean, at 45, I never wrote a goal down from the time I was 11 that I didn’t accomplish, and I never thought I’d get the chance to go out there because I’m a goofball or whatever,” Waters said. “I was old, but I don’t want to see anybody over 40 play this game because of my injuries.”

The group no longer watches the show. Swan and Arcaro said they find it hard to get engrossed in the newer seasons like they did when they were aspirational fans.

“I just have not been sucked in like I used to be,” Arcaro said. “With the way that the game has changed, and the way that it’s just such different gameplay, it’s just not ‘Survivor’ anymore, in my perspective.”

With the anniversary season on the horizon, players said they hope the game returns to what made it so powerful to be a part of: forcing a group of strangers to coexist, despite differences and strong personalities.

“I think it’s something that’s special that ‘Survivor’ provided back then that the world has sort of gotten away from,” Cardona said. “I think the world could be better if everybody in life was socially contracted to do two weeks in the jungle.”

“That bridge-building to differences, especially in this climate, where the world has become very tribal, it’s unfortunate that that’s not what the bottom line of “Survivor” is right now,” Swan said.

The 50th season, which kicks off with a three-hour episode at 8 p.m. Wednesday on CBS, is billed as a celebration of the game, the show and the fans and contestants who brought it this far. Popular contestants from seasons past, 24 in total, will take another stab at bringing home the big bucks.

For players Waters, Swan, Arcaro and Cardano, who won’t return in the 50th season, it’s a chance to revisit the lasting connections they built with each other. It’s also a chance to reflect on all the other former players who won’t return, but who played a vital role in the show’s success.

“They, you guys, made those people be able to exist,” Swan told his former castmates. “Because without the skeleton, there is no body.”