This may well have been the most boring season of "Survivor" to date.

OK, there was "Survivor: Africa," which was a snooze. But, if not the most boring, the current "Survivor: Vanuatu" (7 p.m., Ch. 2) without a doubt featured the highest percentage of really rotten players in the nine seasons of the show.

What you had was a bunch of really dumb guys who started playing an individual game while they should have been playing a team game. As always, the contestants were divided into two tribes. And, for the second time, they were divided along gender lines.

The guys, looking ahead to when the two tribes would merge, started voting out the strongest men. Then, when the tribes were reshuffled, the male-female tribe dominated by men continued to vote out men — and, in turn, got voted out themselves after the merge.

Dopes.

Which is why six of the final seven players were female, with only dopey Chris remaining.

But that's when things started to get interesting. Members of the female alliance started to turn on each other, culminating last week with the delicious sight of Queen Bee Ami — who appeared to be in control of the game for weeks — was ousted.

Which shouldn't have surprised her, but it did. (Boy, was she bitter!) The one who appears to be in control of the game never seems to win. (Even Richard Hatch, who won the first "Survivor," didn't appear to be in control. He was, but nobody realized it at the time.)

At any rate, even this most boring of "Survivors" has suddenly gotten interesting. Tonight's second-to-last episode features Chris, Eliza, Julie, Scout and Twila fighting it out to see who will make the final four. And the two-hour season finale is Sunday at 7 p.m. on Ch. 2, when four gets whittled down to $1 million winner.

The ratings have been very good for "Survivor: Vanuatu" to this point. If you've stuck with it this long, you'll want to see what happens.

And this wouldn't be a bad time to tune in if you haven't been watching.

SHAWN SURVIVES: For the second week in a row, Utahn Shawn Nelson almost got eliminated from Fox's "The Rebel Billionaire: Branson's Quest for the Best." But he managed to hang on.

He did get some free publicity for his company, LoveSac, which his team tried to promote in a publicity-stunt competition. Nelson's idea was a "Love Match" — Muslim-Jewish soccer game to promote peace.

But his team couldn't find any players and didn't get any press to attend, which makes for a really lousy publicity stunt. They lost to the women, who came up with a fake marriage — which ticked off the few members of the media who did show up.

Anyway, Shawn chose Michael to face elimination with him. They got to drive into the Thames (in an Aquacar) with billionaire Richard Branson and rappel down a building, and Branson eventually chose to get rid of Michael and keep Shawn.

It didn't make a whole lot of sense, but this show never does.

By the way, "Rebel Billionaire" continues to bomb in the ratings. It did manage to finish fourth in its time slot, which is better than what its regular fifth-place finish. But that's only because the WB's "Gilmore Girls" was a repeat and finished fifth instead of its usual fourth.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com