‘Survivor’ Sound Mixer Shares 50 Seasons’ Worth of Secrets — From Borneo to Fiji

A lot has changed since “Survivor” first premiered on May 31, 2000, but longtime host Jeff Probst isn’t the only person who’s been with the show since the very beginning. Case in point: re-recording mixer Terrance Dwyer.

The man behind Mixers Post Sound has assembled the CBS staple’s audio post-production teams since Season 1 in Borneo. So to celebrate the reality competition show’s 50th season milestone in Fiji, he opened up to TheWrap about everything that goes on behind the scenes.

“Initially, we’re looking at this and I’m thinking, ‘This doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.’ The scale was bigger than anything I’d ever seen before for an unscripted show. It was prettier than anything I’d ever seen, because the photography was — still is — spectacular,” Dwyer said of the early days. “Today we call it immersive but at the time, I just thought it felt like a travel log, like you had to be there; feel the sand and the salt, the grit that these people were immersed in. It is a fairly high-detailed show. I really looked at it like a feature film and treated it that way. We’ve done a lot more effects work on that show than probably anybody ever does on other reality shows.”

“But besides the immersive nature of it, there was also the other side of it, which was the difficult side — dealing with the noise, dealing with imperfect recording scenarios. For many seasons, there were cicadas. In one season, they were called the car alarm bugs, so they had to whack the trees with sticks to get them to shut up so they could record, just to get the scenes to play correctly. We did a lot of technological advances in this show,” he continued. “We were probably the first in reality to ever use CEDAR Noise Reduction systems, which was used in feature film at the time but we adopted it immediately. A few years later, we discovered another piece of software that was used for music recording, primarily. It was kind of an obscure piece of software, very expensive … but it could actually slice the cicadas right out of the mix. It was wild. From that point on, it became easier, it radically changed the ability for reality shows to clean up their act.”

Dwyer credited the entire production for being the secret to 26 years of success.

” ‘Survivor’ is a show were they take integrity very, very seriously. Authenticity. We have to stay authentic. If you’re doing a big budget action-adventure feature, you can go over the top. Those punches don’t sound like punches, they sound like somebody whacking a tree trunk with a baseball bat,” he explained. “But when we do this kind of work, we try to recreate what got lost in the field. They’re running around with mics out there trying to catch dialogue, they’re not really trying to catch them running into barriers or slapping through the mud. That’s what needs to be reinforced, because you want them to feel the physical drama that they’re actually living through. But that has to stay authentic. If they detect you’re doing it, it destroys the authenticity, and the whole value of this is the authenticity.”

So what has changed since Richard Hatch beat Kelly Wiglesworth 4-3 in that very first Final Tribal Council?

“Every season, I try to do something different to either improve something or just use a new piece of software that could enhance this or fix that. This season is pretty much a continuation of what we’ve been doing for the last 10, which is we’ve become more and more refined — and we’re aware this has a lot of eyeballs on this show,” Dwyer said. “This show takes the production elements very, very, very seriously, unlike any other show. I’ve never seen a show where everybody is so protective of it.”

“I went to Fiji last summer for the first time, but I had never actually really met the guys who do the sound acquisition. So when I was there, all of these guys were so into knowing what I was using of their work. And it’s like, if it’s in the mix, I’m using it,” he further shared. “The foundation of a reality show is everything you can acquire in the field. We can enforce or enhance or whatever in post-production, but the original recording is the best it’s going to get, because it can’t be more authentic than that.”

Plus, one of the biggest changes from Dwyer’s point of view is actually the players themselves: “There was a real rawness to it, when people didn’t know how to play the game. It was a different game. Everybody was sort of figuring out the game, it was a different animal. Now that everybody has seen the game, we’re looking at almost professional players in some ways.”

“I’ve always liked the second season, Australia. That was such a raw environment, the floods and the injuries — it was such a tough shoot,” he added. “Australia’s got some mean, mean critters out there that they saw at night. I think there’s probably a reason they don’t go back.”

Despite contending with wild animals, brutal weather, inhospitable terrain and even dangerous challenges, the most difficult part of the four-time Emmy nominee’s job is actually perfecting the conversations between castaways.

“The most time-consuming part is the dialogue. We spend more time cleaning up the dialogue, making it as clean as we possibly can, smoothing editorial decisions. It’s not easy to do, it’s a tight turnaround, but we’ve developed techniques, ways to deal with the editors that allow us to do it fast,” he said. “That’s always been a challenge, everybody has to move at a pretty hot pace. You want to give the director options. You’ve got to hit it on the mark pretty much every time, you’ve got to figure out what they want and give them what they want and show them what is possible, but you gotta understand their sensibilities.”

“For an audio guy like me, this show has been a gift. There’s not much more you can really say about it. A lot of guys go through entire careers and never have a show that goes two seasons, here I am looking at 50,” Dwyer concluded. “I think it’s serendipity, it’s you sitting at the right seat at the right time.”

“Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans” airs Wednesdays on CBS and streams the next day on Paramount+.

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