Jonathan LaPaglia has one word for fans boycotting Australian Survivor: ‘Good’

The last time I spoke with Jonathan LaPaglia, we were on set in Samoa for what neither of us knew would be his final season of Australian Survivor. It was a brief and sometimes tight-lipped interview, snuck between filming commitments on a sweaty day which followed a tricky late-night tribal council.

Had I known what was coming, I tell him at the start of this new interview two years later, this time over the phone, I would have asked different questions. “Well, had I known, I probably would have given you different answers,” he says, laughing.

A year on from his controversial sacking, the longtime host is returning to reality TV with a new show and a new appreciation for his surprisingly loyal audience.

“I really had no idea how much [fans] appreciated what I was doing,” he says, reflecting on the outrage that many Survivor fans and past players have expressed over the past 12 months at his “blindside” from the network. “I was just head down, grinding away – and I wasn’t doing it to get praise or approval … [The response] has been heartwarming and humbling. And it still continues now.”

His discontent with former employer Network 10 continues, too. When I ask for his response to the many Australian Survivor fans who say they’re boycotting the show without him as host, he had a cheeky one-word reply: “Good.”

The network, he says, “told me ratings were declining, and they were looking for a way to boost that. But that hasn’t worked out, has it? They’ve lost 40 per cent of their audience. Honestly, I can’t believe they’re going again with ratings like that. Those ratings are really catastrophic. And if it continues like this, I don’t see how they can sustain it.”

That 40 per cent drop refers to the overnight ratings for this year’s finale. It’s slightly less than that, but he’s not far off.

On free-to-air and 10Play that night, 462,000 people tuned in to see new host David Genat crown Caleb Beeby in April; that’s compared to a total of 764,000 the year before when Myles Kuah triumphed . Notably, this year’s final episode clashed with the finale of Australian Idol (which pulled 1.08 million viewers) but that doesn’t wholly explain the smaller audience.

JLP’s last season, a shorter international special called Australia v The World , pulled 653,000 viewers for its final instalment at the end of 2025 despite being up against The Block with a mammoth audience of 1.62 million.

In response, Network 10 said that much of the show’s audience comes from catch-up after those figures are collected. And if you look at the whole season, livestream numbers were up 6 per cent from the season Myles Kuah won in 2025. The latest season premiere, for instance, grew its audience 58 per cent in the seven days after it aired. But a drop of 300,000 viewers between the 2025 and 2026 finale is undeniably significant either way – especially considering the latter was triumphantly billed as a live finale and reunion.

“It makes me sad in a way because we all worked really hard on that show,” LaPaglia says. “For 10 years, we worked hard trying to build success … It’s kind of sad to see it crumble like that. It’s not what it was.