I feel like a quarter way into the show is a relatively early point, yet they had already shed off four fish by that time. I can see why they went with ten instead of eight, from an interview I saw with Sam it seemed like they really rushed the casting and were unable to filter out MDE fans that were in on the joke. Apparently next season Sam intends to just bite the bullet and go with professional casting next time around, which I have mixed feelings about.
The cast was not the problem this season, even the MDE fan stuff wasn't an issue, the more I go back and look at old clips the more I think the cast is actually the strongest point of the season, it was really Jet's fuckery that destroyed the season and the problems would slowly begin to resolve, only to collapse and deepen even further later on, the hellish content drought right now is manifesting because of Jet twisting the show weeks ago to eliminate Brian and to get Jimmy into a frothing rage that Trish and Britney exploited. I think JC, Megan and Summer could easily be culled without much issue. Losing Cole was a blow and then purging Brian for shock value was a bigger fuckup, losing Jimmy was an absolute catastrophe. Of the remaining fish the only one that is reasonably able to hold a conversation is Tay. TJ still has trouble speaking at a normal pace when he isn't drunk, he still fills a lot of his conversation with filler like "I uhh I uhh you know... I wanted to do that" and Shinji just remains silent most of the day and only becomes willing to sit down and talk at 1am-3am which is still frustrating because he also has trouble talking as he tries to parse the English language, it was impossible to even hear Tay and Shinji talk last night at the bar and the night before because fatty snores so loudly. Part of the show is just having the fish talk to each other and with such a small cast now having strong conversationalist is even more important. Moreover, the total lack of stimulation from the outside word is stifling their ability to have interesting things to talk about, there was a brief moment with Alex Stein where he was discussing stuff that had gone on in the world while they were isolated that had a decent bit of conversation but that died off quick. These are early 20 somethings and they just haven't had enough life experience to fill 42 days of conversation with stories of their life thus far without new experiences to drive it. Maybe that Russian actress that came in for the dating show could pull it off because she seemed to have a rolodex of interesting stories like the Trump tower story with the room that had no furniture in it, but a 22 year old only has a few interesting life events to talk about.
Then we have the content generation issue, Tay is the only one that has effectively been active the past few weeks, Trish in second place solely due to her love-hate relationship with Chris, alternating between fucking Chris over by pouring water on him and bowing to his insane demands like the wedding. TJ was busy painting himself into a corner in the attic all alone and Shinji was just being a silent wallflower. Tay did absolutely amazing work playing the longform challenges presented to her only for Jet to immediately overturn them to save his favored fish from elimination, TJ. Then he went and bragged to the fish about how he was rigging it to eliminate Trish only for Tay to break the rigging and that he organized it a second time. This had a dramatic effect on anyone's willingness to "play" the game any longer, at this point none of the fish feel compelled to do challenges since there is no upside at all, no cash prizes and no long term benefits on their standing on the show.
This content drought would not be so disasterous if we had Cole, Tay, Brian, Jimmy, and Trish as the final crew moving towards the final week rather than weak fish like TJ and Shinji being carried. The cult theme of the show, particularly the attack therapy was a complete fucking disaster for the show because it created production mandated dogpiling on Cole who walked, and then later on Tay, who managed to thrive in spite both the dogpile and Frank at the same time. Any fish who popped their head up and created organic content was dogpiled in attack therapy and suffered greatly for it, leaving most content being driven by production who was extremely lazy, this supressive effect on content cannot be understated.
Also I'm annoyed people keep hyping Greg up for being amazing, but he really is not anything special, he wasn't around for all of the degrading and demoralizing stuff like Danye was, he didn't have to go through weeks of just eating grits and peanut butter, forced vomiting, fist fights, mallets being hurled, or being subjected to Chris' literal insane demands to avoid elimination. He is mostly fresh and he doesn't have any expectations upon him to participate in degrading challenges. Even the most minor bit of hassling by Frank put him into tears, its easy to be entertaining when you're not being mentally crushed for weeks at a time, the D&D game was interesting but it felt like the fish were just going through the motions just to stave off boredom rather than real enjoyment, him being upbeat and happy is a good thing for the show at this stage but the fish are too burned out to really feed off this positive energy, everyone is just looking for the exit so they can wash their hands of this unfortunate experience. I think he was a good acquisition by Sam for the show but the past 5 weeks of crushing the spirits of the fish cannot be corrected at this point.
