I saw people on X alleging that Jet Neptune was fired due to some things that Sam said on the latest live stream so I decided to check it out.
I would highly doubt Jet or Ben are fired, the problem with Fishtank is lack of preparation and Sam himself is largely implicated in that regard. Obviously there was some severe fiascos that happened, such as eliminating Brian/Octavius/Delaney/Taylor in a short timeframe only for Jimmy to immediately get kicked, leaving the house desperately short on quality fish for an extended period of time. Brian wasn't amazing, but he still would participate in a good manner. They were extremely lucky that Tayleigh was something of a hot head and refused to be bullied by Frank and immediately went on the offensive with counter hassling by smashing eggs on his head, making piss misting bottles, spitting in his face. Had she remained as passive as she was in the first week the show basically would have died entertainment wise the moment Jimmy got kicked.
But the problem remains, both seasons have been largely carried by a single individual, Letty in S1 and Tayleigh in S2. Once either of these two got burned out or disinterested for a stretch of time the show basically ground to a complete standstill and was godawful. Tay seems to have started getting burned out by the show once Trish was eliminated and more or less stated that she wasn't going to be doing anything offensively against Shinji or TJ which immediately killed the final week, Jet and Ben had become so accustomed to being carried by either Tay, Frank or Fatty that they had literally nothing planned and the final week just consisted of Tay walking from room to room just looking at shit vacantly while everyone else just napped the hours away. Even the Swamp Olympics was a rushed thing they did on the fly at the last minute, a themed finale should be the first thing planned before the fish even arrived at the house, instead they improv'd it on the spot a day before the finale happened.
The show being completely adrift was noticed by the audience and particularly Tay multiple times, I had a video of Oliver pointing out how fucking shit and unprepared the production crew was the final week was while talking to Trish and Tay in the living room, but I must have deleted it.
Jet seems to at least be aware at how hard Tay was carrying the show in the back half of the season and went off to B1 and had a little moment of respect talking about how great she was after she was eliminated. Sam seems to just absolutely fucking hate the whole S2 cast and the show itself if I'm reading him properly in that podcast episode with Dascha. He is just a toxic element that just barely phones it in and I think it would be better if he was cut from his own show and someone more serious like Alex Stein put in place. Fishtank
can be a great show at times, the first week was great, the mostly uncensored TTS and rotating cast of freeloaders like Nifty introduce a lot of dynamics that aren't present in other shows in the genre, the S2 cast being abrasive dickheads with politically incorrect views also is a largely something that is uncommon in the genre as well. Someone like Alex Stein being in charge who is a reality TV junkie would probably make the show have a real schedule for activities and eliminations for the fish to plan and scheme around which would let a "villain" like Letty or Tay, or early season Brian actually have a chance at not just surviving, but thriving and have a chance to win. Elimination challenges and rituals being known in advance are a large part of the structure of shows like Survivor and dictate how the cast screws each other over. S2 had zero real eliminations so the cast was just floating along waiting for it to be sprung on them, with the exception of Tay who foolishly participated in the 'Make Chris Cry' challenge that was immediately overturned since she chose to zero out the wrong fish.
