This time they've gone too far.

CBS's Survivor is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for new reward and immunity challenges.

This season contestants vying for the $1 million prize in Gabon were tasked with invading a local native village, finding out in which hut the chief lived, and then torching it.
 

Seriously, though, I think this season's crop of contestants was not that good. Survivor has long been the only reality show I even think of watching, but CBS is getting away from what I've always liked about the show: it was real people with normal backgrounds in this situation that was extraordinary but also reflected the way people act, plan, plot, and make decisions in the real world. 

That is, selfish people interacting with the full knowledge that unmitigated selfishness will not earn them the support they need in the end. 

This time around, the show's producers chose an Olympic athlete, a pin-up model, a professional online gamer (from Orange County!), and a bitch who was proud of being a bitch and despised people who were nice. It seemed clear they were going for sparks over reality.

By the way, pin-up model "Sugar" has some serious daddy issues and Kenny Hoang, in addition to being pathologically afraid of women, seems to have quite a White girl fetish going. Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

I haven't watched the final results, so I don't know who won the $1 million. I'm just glad that none of the total jerks were in the final three this time. Anyway, CBS, take note: It's the ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances that makes the show tick; don't fudge the results by picking wild or unusual people with whom we can't identify.

UPDATE:

The two with the most votes were the physics teacher, who will go away with $1 million, and the part-time elementary school teacher, who wins a $100,000 consolation prize. Which just proves what we've known all along: The only way teachers in America will ever get rich is on game shows.