Watching people get hurt is funny. You know you laughed when your niece missed the clown piñata and crushed your brother’s shins with the baseball bat. You chuckled when your childhood friend rearranged his vas deferens when his skateboard broke on that mall railing. And you snickered when that little old lady ate shit on a patch of black ice. Wipeout, a show that has quickly become a summertime TV favorite, capitalizes on our sadistic need for injury-viewing by setting up ordinary Americans to…well…wipe out.
Without doing any of that time-consuming and unnecessary ‘research’, I’m going to assume that the idea for Wipeout came directly from the success of a show called the Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (MXC from now on) which aired on Spike TV earlier in this century and featured lots of Japanese people running lots of crazy obstacle courses and eating a lot of shit. As anyone who has ever seen it can attest, MXC was awesome.
But while I will commend Wipeout for having above-average commentators (especially Jill Wagner, who I think I’d like to impregnate) and a spirit that truly wants to entertain, it misses on some key points that made its predecessors un-shitty and that have me yelling at my TV every Wednesday (not really, I don’t own a TV.) I’m, of course, going to tell you what those problems are now:
The Erring of Grievances
Item 1: Failure Rate Approaching 100%
When Wipeout first started, it allowed some of its contestants to succeed. Like MXC, a particular athletic American (or Japan…ite?) would breeze through some of the obstacles, and struggle with others, while the whales, grandmas, nerds, and speds would get crushed on pretty much every one. This was great, because it showed the audience that the obstacles were, under the laws of physics, possible, and gave the show a nice balance between success and failure. Now, however, Wipeout has abandoned this balance for a fail-all-the-time approach.
For example, a popular obstacle in the original MXC series called WallBangers (Click for hilarious YouTube video) had hapless Japanese picking one of four doors and trying to run through it. Sometimes the door would open, sometimes it would not. To see those contestants run full bore at a locked door and fail, or tentatively fall through an open one, was hilarious. Recently, Wipeout decided to steal this obstacle and adapt it (shit on it) by making none of the doors penetrable. Every person who does that obstacle fails. And that makes me sad inside.
But it’s not just setup obstacles that are 100% failures, ALL of the obstacles are impossible. It used to be that the Big Balls was the hardest of all of the obstacles. But this season, Big Balls is the obstacle that has the highest success rate by far. If they aren’t hydraulically smashing you with swinging walls, they’re obscuring your view and making you jump over a swinging arm with a trampoline.
I understand what they’re trying to do. They want more people falling down. But if I’ve learned anything in my life it’s this: like a bowel movement after a day of cross-continental flying, wipeouts are not something you can force.
Item 2: Contestants
Choosing appropriate contestants was never really an issue with MXC or Takeshi’s Castle because the appropriate contestant for a show like this is just what Japan has a lot of: unathletic people. The producers of Wipeout however, seem to lean toward picking people whose eyes and hands actually work coordinately. This is obviously a huge blunder. Athletic people have a way of bracing themselves for impact that is visually displeasing. UNathletic people however, have absolutely no idea what their bodies are going to do, which makes watching them fall that much more appealing.
Need proof? Watch this video. (Please don’t stop watching until the good part)
See? Fat people on physical competition-based game shows are hilarious. But they shouldn’t be allowed to quit like she does in the video. Oh you have a herniated disk in your back? Suck it up and get on the next impossible obstacle. Quitter.
Item 3: Penalties/Rewards
What I believe to be Wipeout’s biggest problem is a general lack of penalties and rewards. As far as I can tell, there are no consequences for not finishing an obstacle and no reward for completing it. Thus, a contestant doesn’t really need to actually try any of them. He or she can simply give up and step into the mud after a boxing glove to the face at the Sucker Punch, or just jump into the water and swim to the next obstacle at the Rug Pull. And since they realize this is usually the fastest way to complete the obstacles (and get closer to winning US currency), that’s just what most contestants do. It turns into a swimming contest, not an obstacle course. And even though everyone seems to fall in love with Michael Phelps every four years, I think it’s fair to say that Americans typically don’t give a shit about competitions involving swimming.
Solutions
Try harder. Do better.
You’re a non-cable, primetime television game show with thousands of minutes of predecessor footage to learn from for God’s sake. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for your engineers to fabricate some balanced obstacles, your designers to design incentivized transitions, and your producers to choose some fat contestants. You have the opportunity to become the most important injury-based television show since America’s Funniest Home Videos, but if you continue to oversaturate the airwaves with forced falls and unfair obstacles, you’ll go the way of the Aggro Crag in way fewer seasons than you anticipate. Showing contestants willingly puncture their lungs and tear their meniscuses on obstacles you create for FREE is a privilege not a right. Don’t take it for granted, and stop screwing it up.
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oh shit, I can’t stop laughing at Vonti getting splashed all over the big balls!
Mike O’Malley thanks you for the GUTS drop.