Survivor fans watching the premiere of the show’s 50th season last week.
Photo: Kimberly Kolbert Photography
It’s 7 p.m. on a Wednesday in February, and the top floors at St. Pat’s Bar & Grill on 46th Street are so full that a line of people is snaking down to street level. Small paper flames dangle from the ceiling tiles while larger flame cutouts engulf a portrait of St. Patrick. All over, island grass is zip-tied to columns. “The leaves aren’t going anywhere,” says Yvonne Lopez, the bar’s general manager. “Those took forever to put up.”
Near the kitchen doors, Alex Forstenhausler, a 36-year-old screenwriter, has made a two-hour trip from New Jersey to be here. When I find him, he’s inflating a seven-foot plastic palm tree. “I only blew up one,” he says, “because it was already so packed in here.”
The occasion, of course, is the season-50 premiere of Survivor. For the past several years, fans of the long-running CBS reality show have landed here, in midtown, at what is arguably the most robust viewing party in the country. To get a prime corner table with the best sight line to the projector, Ian, a 30-year-old performer from the Upper West Side, was the first fan to arrive. He got here at 6 p.m. and finished up some work remotely over a St. Patti melt and beer. “I only come for the big episodes — premieres and finales,” he says. “Yes, it’s crowded, but the electricity of watching Coach and Ozzy with 100 other people screaming isn’t something I can replicate with four friends in my living room.”
Lopez, who recently bought matching Survivor shirts for her staff to wear on watch nights, explains that the crowd, especially compared to the sports fans who fill St. Pat’s on other nights, are “not big drinkers,” but it’s worth turning over the space (and TVs) for the party anyway, because the Survivor fans tend to order a lot. “It’s like they’re home,” she says. “They order dinner and sit in front of the TV like they’re on the couch.” Last December, during the season-49 finale, the bar did $15,000 in sales in a single night. (A bartender calls all of the Survivor fans “the nicest people.”)
Kelly Smith is wearing a shirt that looks like Eras Tour merch, with Jeff Probst’s face instead of Taylor Swift’s. The 27-year-old says she moved to New York from Baltimore five years ago and was looking for a place like St. Pat’s. As we’re talking, Smith points out where she once sat beside former contestant Billy Garcia as if pointing out Sinatra’s booth at P.J. Clarke’s. “Every week after work my friends would be like, ‘I’m going to Carbone with a guy from Hinge,’” she says. “I’d be like, ‘Cool. I’m going to watch Survivor at a bar by myself.’” Her search for a group of fellow fans led her to midtown, and St. Pat’s, where she eventually found her tribe.
Two tables back sits Jordan Kalish, the PE teacher from Riverdale who started this Survivor party with Innessa Huot, an employment attorney who on this night is nursing her first glass of Sauvignon Blanc in a year after giving birth two months ago. They began watching the show together years ago at Huot’s Financial District one-bedroom, but the Pizza and Beer Alliance, as it was known, outgrew those walls and moved to a bar called Stone Creek. “I vividly remember the last night there was March 11 of 2020 and it was a very small crowd — much smaller than usual because there was this virus out there,” Kalish recalls. “We had conversations like, ‘Should we really be out?’ But then we were like, ‘It’s ‘Winners at War.’ And it’s Survivor!” Stone Creek went out of business during the pandemic and for a while, this Alliance had no place to go. Most bars wanted to charge a cover for the party, but St. Pat’s was willing to let them use the bar’s third floor for free. The first night there — to watch the premiere of season 41 in 2021 — drew about 50 people, says Huot. “They were like, This is great business!” But the following season, two former contestants had posted on Instagram they’d be in attendance. The party spilled down from the third floor to the second. “I’d guess there were 250 people on two floors,” Kalish says. “The bartenders still talk about it.” He points out that at least two employees have started watching old episodes in their downtime, too: “They’re part of our cult now.”
Since the pandemic, Survivor has been discovered by Gen Z, meaning that 26 years after its debut, it is still among the most-watched shows on television. And the crowd somehow skews younger than it once did. On the second floor during the season-50 premiere, two women in their 20s tell me they’re recent converts. “I’m slightly embarrassed to say I binged every season in two years after watching it with college roommates,” says Semantika, a product manager and recent transplant from Toronto, who has just met two sisters from Dallas, also new to the city. (One of those sisters, a 27-year-old opera singer and director named Lisl Wangermann, first learned about St. Pat’s through a Google search — though her sister wasn’t convinced until, a day later, a video on TikTok confirmed it was the place to be.)
Soon, all talking stops as the commercial break ends and Mike White’s face pops onscreen for a confessional. The group is friendly and outgoing but talking during an episode or blocking someone’s view are severe social felonies. Once the show starts, the only sounds you hear are squeals during a challenge win, or a collective gasp during a blindside. Kalish remembers an earlier season when a group of holiday-party stragglers in Patagonia vests wandered up to the third floor and didn’t read the room. “People were angry,” Kalish says. “It’s like, Do you not see what’s going on here?”
