Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Fifth Professional Sport

You know what I love? Extremely shitty TV. Tonight is the season finale of MTV's "The Challenge", which Bill Simmons coined as "the fifth professional sport". On this show, extremely stupid people, many of which are on steroids, compete in hair brained "challenges" which range from KY jelly wrestling to eating competitions and spelling bees, where a misspelled word results in the contestant being catapulted 50 feet into water. Couple these challenges with unmitigated alcohol abuse and a propensity for drama, and you have a terrible show I love to make fun of and feel better about myself while watching. Currently I am three glasses of wine deep in preparation for this Super Bowl-esque event, and I am giddy with excitement. This season pitted teams comprised of four cast members of various "Real World" seasons, and there was no shortage of people who stopped being nice, and started getting real.



At the moment I write this, there are only 3 teams left: Brooklyn, a savvy team of douche-canoes consisting of four cartoon characters. JD, who's so quiet I had to look up his name. Apparently he trains dolphins. Chet, a hipster who is fond of wearing hats that say "Chet", Sarah with her gloriously horrible tattoos and Devyn, probably the most hilarious of the bunch, and an ebony beauty queen. I know my last post was about not being a hater, and this may seem like hating, but my life would be so much less fun without these people, thus it is anything but. I celebrate their narcissism (N-A-R-C-I-S-S-I-S-M, Chet's bane in the spelling bee challenge) on a weekly basis.

Next we have team San Diego, a group of rookies who have managed to make it to the final challenge. This is perhaps the most volatile team of the bunch, as well as being the only other complete team of four. Before I go on, I should take a moment to explain the structure of the show for those unfamiliar. Each week's challenge yields a best and worst team. The best team, aka the "power team" is immune to the dreaded elimination round, the arena. The power team also has the privileged of hand picking a team to go into the arena, which makes for fascinatingly retarded political maneuvering  The worst team has an automatic ticket to the arena, and this matchup between the selected team and the worst team comprises the last 15 minutes of each show. Team San Diego has won several challenges, and has no love of team Brooklyn. A quick survey of their personalities makes the reasoning pretty clear. You have Zach, an arena football player, Frank who's not only gay as the day is long, but also clinically psychotic. Then for the females you have Sam who is utterly gender confused, and extremely sensitive, and then the light of my life, Ashley, who is by far the most attractive girl on the show. Their hatred for Brooklyn is evident by the fact that they flat out sent them to the arena two or three times. Each time Brooklyn was successful, and came back with a vengeance.

The last team, which has lost two of its members to the arena, is team Las Vegas. The two that still remain are Trishelle of Playboy fame, and Dustin, a southern pretty boy who at one point participated in something called "the Frat House" which is a paid subscription voyeur service for gay men. In this, attractive dudes are set up in a house rigged with cameras, and walk around naked all day. My boss at work, a gay man, has said that this is a very popular site in the gay community. The members of team Vegas that are no longer present are Alton, a black man who sprinkles HGH on his cheerios, and Nany, who was the object of one of Frank's insane drunken barrages. They were eliminated in a highly controversial arena where Trishelle welched on an agreement to volunteer herself for the arena after a poor performance in a challenge. After the two were sent home, Dustin was livid and it has taken all of 2 minutes and thirty seconds in the following episode to make amends. These people have the memories of goldfish.

With all that said, the teams are now competing in the finale, which took them to Africa. The teams with less than superb athletic specimins (Sam on team San Diego, and Devyn on team Brooklyn) will be the most interesting to watch. Typically the last challenge is some kind of long distance battle against the elements. Last year's battle of the exes took the finalists to Iceland, with a devestating 15 mile trek on snow shoes. This year appears to be in a desert, and I'm going to finish my glass of wine whenever someone bails due to heat stroke. Don't worry, I'll just go ahead and call in sick to work now to save myself the trouble.

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