Survivor executive producer Matt Van Waganen, casting director Jesse Tannenbaum, editor and returning cast member Tiffany Nicole Ervin dished on the CBS reality series’ “incredible” Season 50 and looked ahead at the upcoming Season 51 during an appearance at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio.

“Well, I think for us, Season 50, when Jeff [Probst] first talked about it, it was about being a celebration. And every time we talked about this, we thought, how can this be a celebration? And for us, celebration meant throwing everything at the players that we could, which I think we did,” said Van Wagenen. “And as we threw things at them, they really took it all in and attacked it, so they bought in with everything that we were doing, which made it for me an amazing season to watch and be a part of for sure.”

As Van Wagenen looks ahead to Season 51, he revealed “50 was really the leaping-off point for what we are calling the open era, and that really is — the phrase we use out there is ‘permanent uncertainty.’ As much as we had a lot of question marks and a lot of curveballs in 50, we’ve amped it up for 51.”

Watch the panel conversation below and scroll down for photos from the event.

Speaking about casting the castaways, Tannenbaum said “it is hard to predict because sometimes you’re dealing with people, talking to them, and they’re completely different on the show than they were through the casting process. He adds, “we really work hard to find compelling people to play one of the most incredible reality shows that’s ever been created. You throw them out there, and it’s up to them what they do with this opportunity, and that’s in their gameplay, and that’s in the personality they bring to the show. So it is a little complicated.”

Ervin, who first appeared on Survivor 46, shared her excitement at returning for Season 50, and admitted Van Wagenen “is not lying when he says they threw everything they had at us.”

“I’ve been watching this show my whole life as a person, played it, and then to be able to come back on such a monumental season, it was palpable how excited and how grateful everybody was to just be a part of such an experience,” she said. “And then to take it a step further and say, not only am I on a landmark season, but I’m doing things that have literally never been done before, so even though something as chaotic and crazy as the blood moon coming at me, I’ve never seen it before. But I’m like, let me at it!”

Barefoot, who has served as an editor on Survivor since its Season 1 launch, spoke of mining an enormous amount of footage to capture just the right moments. “We’re looking for those, not just the story points, but the little moments, the little things that you may miss. We, the editors, we’re the first audience to see how it plays on a screen, and we’re fans. When I see an eye roll from Tiffany, it’s like, I’m putting a mark on that, and I will use that shot somewhere.”

All had praise for Probst, who has hosted the series since its launch, and serves as executive producer and showrunner. Probst’s enthusiasm “is infectious,” said Tannenbaum. “When you think about surviving, you think about Jeff, that’s natural. The amount of care and passion he has, not just for the show, but for every single person that works on the show, for the cast that has been on the show, the future cast, even the applicants that go through the casting process and might have met him and didn’t go further, he’s like, how are they doing? How do they take the news? Are they okay? He just truly is caring, and that’s nothing but inspiring to make us want to work that much harder.”

The long-running reality series received five Emmy nominations for Season 50 including Outstanding Reality Competition Program, Outstanding Host for a Reality Program (Probst), Outstanding Cinematography for a Reality Program, and Outstanding Picture Editing for a Structured Reality or Competition Program.

There’s always the theme of hope in the Star Wars franchise, and with the brand landing its lowest grossing live-action feature in the franchise with The Mandalorian and Grogu ($345M WW), fans still wanna know: is there any shot in the galaxy that Disney/Luscasfilm would re-consider an Adam Driver-led The Hunt for Ben Solo project?

Deadine caught up with Lucasfilm co-President and Mandalorian and Grogu co-writer and producer Dave Filoni at D23 and asked whether Kylo Ren would ever make a comeback.

“It’s not here, you won’t find it here,” said Filoni, “The force is not with us in that regard; I love the love you feel for it.”

Ever since the news broke last fall that former CEO Bob Iger and Disney Entertainment co-Chairman Alan Bergman deep-sided Driver and director Steven Soderbergh’s development of a Kylo Ren movie, a fervent fanbase arose rallying the project’s resurrection. The Hunt for Ben Solo was set to take place in the events following Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, and put the former Kylo Ren on a redemptive path.

After an earnings call last November, a plane with the banner “Shareholders Want The Hunt for Ben Solo,” buzzed over Disney’s Burbank lot. Other stunts followed, led by the Save Ben Solo org: In March, professional skydiver Brenn Richards jumped out of a plane tied to Toronto Comic-Con with a flag tied to her that read “Save the Hunt for Ben Solo”. She also held a note as for Disney’s new CEO as she plummeted to Earth: “Josh D’Amaro, Skydiving is risky! but…The Hunt for Ben Solo isn’t!”.

During the Mandalorian and Grogu LA premiere in May, the fan org hired a digital truck that drove around Hollywood, and again outside the El Capitan on opening night, May 21. The truck returned to San Diego Comic-Con last month as well. All of this followed another professional skydiver jumping for the campaign in Times Square.

Iger and Bergman’s axing a Kylo Ren project stemmed from the antagonist being dead in 2019’s Star Wars, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. It just didn’t make sense to them that he’d continue to live thereafter. This despite such characters as Darth Maul, Boba Fett and Emperor Palpatine being revived after their deaths in the Star Wars canon. Driver first made it known to the world that the project existed and was turned-down in an October 2025 AP interview.

But, for fans, when it comes to the future of Kylo Ren on the big screen, to quote Pedro Pascal’s Mandalorian, “This is the way.”

The big shocking, but not so shocking news last night at D23 is that Driver is back in business with Disney, just not on the Star Wars side, rather the MCU where he’ll play X-Men baddie Mister Sinister in the next reboot of the franchise.

Creed Bratton’s commitment to his art was on full display on the set of Smiling Friends.

Painting himself fully green for “Le Voyage Incroyable de Monsieur Grenouille,” an episode in the adult animated sitcom’s third and final season that brought the show its first Emmy nomination, The Office alum must have hoped to get the paint off by the end of his guest star appearance.

Per the show’s co-creators Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack, though, that’s not what happened.

“He was so good and really fun to work with. He was painted green fully all over the body,” Hadel recalls during an appearance for Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio. “He had to go film a movie the next day and apparently still had some green on him. So the green lasted many weeks.”

Watch the conversation with Hadel and Cusack here.

The film Bratton was going to shoot, we’ve confirmed, was Primetime, A24’s crime thriller starring Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator‘s Chris Hansen, which we scooped in 2024.

Incredibly, the paint hadn’t completely come off even by the time Bratton was done with that project.

Cusack said, “He told our friend, the one that hired him, he said he went to the doctor a month later and they’re just doing a basic checkup. And he’s like, ‘Why is your skin slightly tinged green?’ And he’s like, ‘No, it’s not a health problem. I just painted myself with paint that never comes off, so it’s totally fine.’”

Smiling Friends is an absurdist, mixed-media comedy starring Cusack and Hadel as Pim and Charlie, employees at a company whose job is to help make unhappy people smile.

Bratton painted himself green for a live-action appearance as the father of Mr. Frog, a character Hadel describes as “the dumbest” in the show, which the creators conceived early in the design process on Smiling Friends. Over the course of the show’s Emmy-nominated episode, we follow this supporting character — a “hollowed out” TV star,” in Hadel’s words — from his leap to President and then ruler of the world. The episode then goes as deep as is possible, in the span of just 11 minutes, into what makes Mr. Frog tick.

The intention, Cusack says, was to see what would happen in devoting “a cinematic, prestigious TV episode” to “the stupidest character in all of animation.”

Of the show’s Emmy nomination for Outstanding Animated Program along long-running and beloved series like The Simpsons, Cusack said, “We feel very honored. Obviously, we grew up with all the shows that we’re against and respect them very much. We would’ve never thought in a million years that our little quarter-hour show that we did for Adult Swim would be in this league, so we feel very honored by it and it’s a very nice feeling.”

In the conversation with Deadline, Cusack and Hadel underscored that it’s easy to underestimate the rigors of crafting a 2D animated series, frame by frame, in 2026, putting the ambition of their process in context.