Jeff Probst reminds Mike White of Sisyphus, the mythological king cursed to spend eternity trying, and failing, to push an enormous boulder up a steep slope. White means this as a compliment. Every time Probst embarks upon a new season of Survivor, he’s “starting again like, ‘We’re gonna do this!’ There’s something very touching about that,” the White Lotus creator tells me. “He’s on the 50th season of Survivor…. Each time he really goes into it thinking, This is gonna be the best season.” When Survivor launched in the spring of 2000, it effectively created the reality competition genre. It has aired through six presidential administrations, through 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, the legalization of same-sex marriage and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the global pause initiated by the pandemic and the political unrest that has followed. Things change, but Survivor is still throwing a range of everyday Americans into an exotic location, then watching how they interact as they vote each other out, one by one. And though other OG reality hosts …