Most major professional sports have offseasons filled with blockbuster trades, upside loaded drafts where we hear constantly about things like wingspan, player signing periods, and a consistent flow of media attention (something has to fill all twenty four hours of television programming on ESPN and its numerous subsidiaries). The Challenge, widely accepted at this point as the fifth major professional sport (at least in the United States, international football nitpickers), is uniquely kept under a contracted (designed to be Frank Sweeney proof) veil of secrecy. Some early rumors sustain our rampant excitement, but can they be trusted? What if a speculated participant’s strange twitter absence this fall was due to an intended social media purge and not because they were in some remote location filming? If MTV and challengers won’t confirm the inevitable competitor picture collage that surfaces, should we consider it reliable?
All of this uncertainty surrounding the twenty fifth (Twenty five seasons! Incredible!) of The Challenge faced its celebrated demise earlier this week when official cast pictures were unwrapped for the new season. With an enormous appetite officially whetted, today the first appetizer course was served. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you the first trailer for The Challenge: Free Agents:
Things just got real. It is time for my annual “Zapruder Analysis” (frame by frame dissection) of this scintillating sixty seconds of glorious footage. So we begin…
0:01 – This opening aerial shot of the maze-like collision star set against the foreboding underscoring is an immediate tone-setter. “Welcome to The Challenge. Warning: competitive danger lies ahead.” One second in and the excitement level could not possibly higher.
0:02 – I have watched this collision back now several dozen times, and this is the real deal, people. Nany obliterates Cara Maria (finally here to start a season for a change!) head on and then ricochets into the modern Amazonian goddess, Laurel (Welcome back! We missed you). The Challenge: Free Agents is a full-contact sport and will show no mercy.
0:04 – In case you have any doubts about just how dangerous things will get, this burning demonstration should dispel these doubts.
0:05: “This season, it’s an individual game – Free Agents,” explains TJ Lavin the Great. The time had come for a move to a more individual game free from the alliances of old and the attempts to dethrone them of the new. One bittersweet realization is that Sarah will not be competing for the first time in seven challenges. No one deserves a shot at individual The Challenge glory more than Sarah who had the misfortune of being teamed up with a quitting partner (Trishelle on Rivals 2), Devyn in an endurance heavy final (on Battle of the Seasons, although I am happy to see Devyn compete a second time), and a partner who assaulted another competitor (Vinny on Exes). Can’t she be a late game arrival like Cara Maria? Could she at least be brought on this time as “The Confessioner?” Let us hope. In the meantime, Cara’s reaction to TJ’s announcement is without a price.
0:06 – TJ Lavin the Great without a hat and his “flow” haircut underneath? This season does promise to have many changes.
0:11 – CT’s soundbite: “I’ve always been a free agent. Now everybody’s gonna have to play my game.” The defending champion and Boston’s strongest is back! I agree with him. This season could have been called The Challenge: Experience what CT goes through every year. My question is, like in the other four major professional sports, can you sign free agents to work for your team? Great season title, Bunim-Murray.
0:17 – Lost in the “challenges that are up high are really scary” surface level understanding of these images is the triumphant return of Jessica, last season’s surprising Real World: Portland alum. The heroic valiance of her Princess Hulk final performances was not lost on this loyal Challenge commentator (nor was her dedicated offseason workout regimen). My preseason power rankings are forthcoming (sometime in the next three weeks), but I have a feeling Jessica’s placement is going to surprise a lot of people. Bold prediction: she is one of the handful of competitors to watch this season and could go deep.
0:19 – Seriously though, please be careful when you are up that high or you might fall off. Oops.
0:21 – “This is an individual game. This is not a team game.” – Johnny Bananas. The Challenge does not really begin until the legendary Johnny Bananas has a say. Although maybe not of the poetic permanence of Johnny’s “All’s fair in love, war, and Challenges” from last season, the profound simplicity of his two sentences stands out. The subtext: “It is every man and woman for his or herself and I plan to win. This time I am playing only for Johnny.” Welcome back, Johnny. The Challenge is what it is today because of you and will not be the same when you finally hang up your oversized bandana. (One additional note: congrats to reigning champ and recent Challenge retiree Paula who is recently engaged and having a baby).
0:22 – Camila shows the new elimination format twist (TJ Lavin the Great loves a good twist!) confirmed in today’s BuzzFeed article: one person in the elimination round will be chosen by the winner of the challenge, but the other person will be chosen by a random drawing. If you want to be safe, you have to win.
0:24-0:28 – Aneesa, Devyn, and Jonna cannot believe their eyes. Chet lets us know that he is “going to fight for every inch.” The elimination arena does not seem like the happiest of places.
0:30 – “Romance” is in the air (after this disastrous season of The Bachelor, I couldn’t be more ready)! Last season, Jordan had a momentous hookup with Sarah in a closet. This season, it appears he is smitten with Laurel. Beyond impeccable taste in women, Jordan is a legitimate threat to win this Challenge. In other Real World: Portland news, Johnny (as in Daisy Dog, Bridgewater, MA Johnny) continues to inexplicably kiss beautiful women (First Averey, now Nany).
0:32 – “I believe that hooking up in the game may have its advantages.” Jemmye knows what’s up. I would also argue that a Challenge without Knight has its advantages for the audience, for other’s pining to guard CT’s body, for those wishing to be treated with respect, and especially for Preston and Jemmye who can finally be out from under Knight’s disrespectful behavior for the first time.
0:33 – Wait, who is Dustin kissing?
0:35 – So, Nany likes to kiss…
0:37 – …and may be crying because of it. Poor thing. I am just glad Dustin is back as her “big brother” emotional support rock.
0:38 – “The only way to stay safe in this game is to win.” TJ Lavin the Great should know.
0:38 – Isaac has returned after a seven season hiatus. Always a little bit of a wildcard (as erratic behavior on his original Real World: Sydney season showcased), Mr. Stout and his fashion pioneering haircut will be an interesting addition to this group of mostly established Challenge competitors.
0:39 – This is some nice camera focus work highlighting this potential showdown between likely women’s favorite Laurel and Theresa (another breakout performer, especially in extracurricular nighttime activity, early on last season). In case you haven’t already realized, this cast is kind of stacked.
0:42 – Listen, Swifty is not the tallest of men, so he needs to elevate himself sometimes to get through a scrum. Also noteworthy in these images is the most substantive footage of Frank in the entire trailer. Is this an intentional slight? Is MTV that burned by his open, honest, and apparently contract-breaching Grantland interview that they have gone out of their way to edit him out here? Or, does the lack of footage indicate an early elimination? You can say many things about Frank, but one thing you must admit is that he has been GREAT for the last two seasons of The Challenge. Let us hope that this is all “much ado about nothing” conjecture.
0:43 – Um, who is this woman?
0:43 – I feel like Zach is often in a lot of pain.
0:44 – “It’s me vs. you and I love that.” And this Challenge commentator loves that you are back, Laurel. After three finals losses (the last of which was on the first Rivals too many seasons ago), Laurel deserves another shot to be the first person of a season to reach the proverbial Challenge mountain top. A few years removed, a few years wiser, but still the same exceptional athlete and beautiful presence, Laurel is the woman to beat.
0:47 – I think that canoes are meant to stay upright, but I could be wrong.
0:48 – Perhaps the most telling moment of the trailer comes around the forty eight second mark. Although a brief conversation, there is potentially so much here. Jordan: “I will send you home.” The Legendary Johnny Bananas: “I will end you, bro.” These two had some competitive clashes in Thailand last season on Rivals 2, but now that each individual has a degree of free agency, it could get even more interesting this season. Their battle for supremacy could be one of the central story lines of Free Agents.
0:51 – Yes! There will be snow on the final! There will be a midseason climate change! That’s what I’m talking about!
0:54 – Boom.
0:57 – …And on Thursday nights? Very interesting. The countdown to April 10 has officially begun.
Note: Culture Challenged will be covering The Challenge: Free Agents all season (I moved all my work from Bishop and Company). Stay tuned for preseason power rankings columns in the coming weeks.
The Challenge: Free Agents premieres April 10 at 10 p.m. on MTV.
The wait is finally over: the new season of Funny or Die’s Billy on the Street debuts tonight at 11 on Fuse (a music video television network whose lack of cultural ubiquity is a bit of its own running gag). If you have spent any amount of time on Culture Challenged, you will be aware of my unabashed adoration for Billy Eichner’s comedic genius. His brand of irreverent, pop cultured guerrilla comedy forces laughter out of me in a way that countless other admitted funny things have tried and failed.
As someone who has been a loyal follower of Mr. Eichner from close to the beginning of his time on TV, yesterday’s bookended appearances on first The Today Show with Hoda and Kathie Lee (perfection) in the morning and then on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon in late night were an unexpected treat. Coupled with appearances as recurring character, Craig the yeller, on Parks and Recreation over the last several months, today Billy is on the tipping point of the career Leap. Buy some stock, jump on the bandwagon, quickly name three white people, and come experience a comedic genius.
ABC producers, the embattled Chris Harrison, past The Bachelor participants, any woman that had the privilege of “dating Juan Pablo” this season, and both the live studio and television viewing audience all burst into a collective outpouring (at least in our heads) of this…
…last night when Juan Pablo finally walked off the stage to the ambiguous “private life” of “happiness” with Nikki (or NEE-KEE as he calls her). Poor Nikki, so unaware that she was along for the wild ride to a man that seemed to be all confused about what he was on The Bachelor for in the first place, never got that public real moment of love that should be the light at the end of this surreal group dating extravaganza tunnel. There was already little to dispel the disastrous season that was (Juan Pablo’s public homophobic comments and then “pervert” language barrier explanation already pretty much nailed the coffin shut), but last night’s finale, filled with more offensive comments, more emotional unawareness, and a whole lot of off-putting behavior, took the horrific Juan Pablo Television Experiment to a new low. Thankfully, there are some takeaways to pull out of the rude and ugly debris field. Here are ten lessons learned from both the finale and this season of The Bachelor:
1) If the Bachelor’s parents warn the final two women against committing to their son, then it is probably not a good idea to continue to pursue a relationship with said son.
2) Contrary to what Juan Pablo thinks, “I like you a lot” is not the new “I love you.”
3) Repeating “It’s ok” every time there is conflict is not ok and may ostracize the woman you are attempting to date.
4) If the two “frontrunners” leave the show because they are not feeling the Bachelor, then there is something wrong with the Bachelor.
5) When the Bachelor openly antagonizes host Chris Harrison during the “After the Final Rose” reunion show, you know, if it is not abundantly clear already, that the man selected to be the Bachelor was an unmitigated mistake.
6) If host Chris Harrison concludes the “The After the Final Rose” show by saying, “Another season of The Bachelor comes to an end. Not going to lie, I’m ok moving on,” he is thrilled to not have to work with this Bachelor again.
7) When Sean Lowe says, “To each his own,” he does not like the person he is describing.
8) Any nostalgic momentum related to a Josh Krajcik live performance on an early season date is not enough of a reason to sustain a relationship.
9) Women do not always enjoy it when a man does excessive face touching.
10) If you avoid sleep in the fantasy suite, it should not be to count down the minutes until a morning escape.
Andi, welcome! The Bachelor/Bachelorette nation could not be happier to have you as the current face of the franchise and to finally, as you did two weeks ago, say goodbye to Juan Pablo for good.
I watched the eighth and final episode of season one of True Detective this morning, twelve hours after the first airing. True Detective, the groundbreaking (certainly in form – more on this in a bit) HBO series and the current holder of the “show everyone is talking about” championship belt (wrestled away from House of Cards sometime in the last three weeks), has slowly dug its aggressive nails into my blood stream of admiration and enjoyment. As further indication of both its cultural impact and the rampant account password freeloading that is taking place within its on-line streaming paradise (of which I am an admitted transgressor – thank you, Dad), HBO Go literally crashed last night due to over use (the fact that Girls had one of its best episodes of the season last night certainly did not help), asking me and millions of others hoping to experience the final chapter in the Rust Cohle and Marty Hart saga to “try again later.” This delay was perhaps a blessing in disguise, especially having watched the beautiful, but sensory overloaded series premiere of the new Cosmos right before I turned on my Apple TV HBO Go interface to indulge in True Detective.Alert and with a rested mind, I sat down this morning to finish the story.
Much of the written word chatter on old reliables (publications like Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, and HitFix) last week was all about possible theories to the Yellow King “who-done-it” central mystery of this season. Who was the Yellow King? Were either Marty or Rust somehow involved in all of these serial murders? What is up with the present day uniformed detectives that spent so much of the first six episodes listening intently to 2012 Marty and Rust wax poetic on a seventeen-year-old case and the minutia of their fated relationship? Is there a reason all the facts of the case seem so hazy even after only seven episodes of content? Honestly, I didn’t have time to spend culling through all of these case resolution theories, and admittedly, I didn’t really care.
I spoke to my Dad last night to try to make sense of it all. On the eve of the final episode of the season, I had totally bought in to True Detective, but something felt so different than the other shows (and particularly central mystery experiences like Broadchurch) I have cherished in recent years. My Dad’s admission, and subsequently, his implicit permission for one of my own, gave some perspective. I am paraphrasing here, but my Dad said something like, “I really love True Detective – the direction, the actors, the characters – and you know me, I figure out what is going on, but Dave, with this one, I really have no clue what is happening and I am not sure it even matters.” I now had permission to know that my appreciation for True Detective had nothing to do with my ability to follow any part of the central mystery that I freely admit had me completely lost.
(SPOILER ALERT!!!) When the closing scene between Marty and Rust at the hospital faded to dark, the light that my Dad and I thought we couldn’t see all season had actually been seen all along. The identity of the Yellow King and the corruption that surrounded the eventual scarred face of the serial killing didn’t really matter to us viewers (even though his schizophrenic accents were of great intrigue). The central mystery was just a device to tell the true story of these two detectives and because it was something they obsessed over, we were along for ride after ride, as ill-advised and remote as they often were. All along, True Detective was always just about Marty and Rust and their internal battles between light and darkness. One of the chattering critiques of this first season of True Detective was its surface level and often one-noted depiction of women. I now get, as frustrating as it was at times, why this was a justified byproduct of a consummate adherence to the central conceit. Our story was through the lens and into the depths of Marty and Rust’s eyes and souls. Anything else, including woman that either informed them (as Maggie, reliably, certainly did) or informed us (Marty’s sea of affairs) about this light and darkness struggle, were there to support our understanding of the truth of these two detectives.
To rebuke some of the inevitable “that was it” backlash that comes from a mystery ending that didn’t matter too much in the first place, True Detective leaves three primary legacies in its high grassed swamps of Louisiana. The first is in its storytelling form. To set most of the story in three distinctive time periods, often without confirming the circumstances or solvency of the given truth, felt at times revelatory. Lost played with this time period jumping trope, but eventually and disappointingly toward a science fictional end. In contrast, for a while there, True Detective’s interest level stemmed from questioning the circumstances of the 2012 present (Rust Cohle beer can after beer can-crushing and all) set against the plot moving and “A story” 1995 past. Maintaining this type of uncertainty about the show we were actually watching for most of the season gave each episode a burst of intrigue.
The second takeaway from True Detective, although at times leading to a restrictive tunneled vision, was the complete execution of a series by one writer and one director. If you are to make me pick sides, I am more on Team Director Cary Fukunaga (not back for season two – the cinema is calling) than on Team Writer Nic Pizzolatto (back for more truth and lies in season two), but the consistency of this one unified vision certainly can be felt throughout the series (I think a few more idea cooks in the creative kitchen would have been of benefit, but the end result did by no means suffer all that much). Like the now understood “a case study of two characters” was why to watch the series, Pizzolatoo and Fukunaga and their pursuit of greatness was why watching was so enjoyable.
The final lasting legacy of True Detective will be as a brilliant model for the ascension of the television medium through the casting and subsequent performances of its two lead actors, Matthew “2014: see the year of” McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. It was not lost on me as I watched McConaughey’s gut-wrenching and flawless final monologue that I had just spent eight hours of television with the reigning Best Actor (I still think Leo should have won!) Academy Award-winner. McConaughey and his inevitable Emmy win (a confident prediction on this March day) speak to how television gives to character and story in a way that film cannot. Our relationship with Rust Cohl and Marty Hart over eight hours provides a different degree of depth and understanding. I hope this more flexible forum (in terms of schedule) that True Detective pioneered for truly great movie actors like McConaughey and Harrelson to have such freedom to explore characters in a more meaningful way will set the tone for other future limited series. For now, we can speculate who will fill the big shoes that McConaughey and Harrelson have left to a new set of season two lead actors and relish in the journey that was into the cavernous deep of Marty and Rust’s truth. L’Chaim!
There is really no way around this unintentionally comedic gift that, now five days out, keeps on giving. I could “let it go” and at some point soon I will, but I am just not ready yet. My new favorite part: Mr. Travolta’s diction on “wickedly.” If you are going to take a journey into the realm of pronunciation absurdity, you might as well be giving it your all. See what Mr. Travolta may have done to your name and enjoy this ten seconds of joy again (or in my case, repeatedly).
Last week, Grantland’s masterful television commentator, Andy Greenwald, delivered one of those brilliant pieces of prose that have amazingly become par for his contributor page course. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Greenwald that The Americans is the “best show on television” is not the point (I can find reasonable justification for this argument), but rather how Greenwald’s written ideas and the eloquent delivery thereof make watching television exponentially better. It is no coincidence that my ascendant television watching identity and desire to occasionally write about it have been aligned with my time as an avid Greenwald reader. His influence is felt in the same way that a Roger Ebert review always made the movie experience better or how a Bill Simmons column (and the Grantland Chief who thought that Andy Greenwald would be a perfect choice to write about television for the almost three-year-old sports and entertainment commentary Mecca) makes my lifelong NBA fan experience that much more amazing and fantastic.
The upcoming Gotham series continues to add actor batarangs to its casting utility belt. David Mazouz will be playing thirteen year old Bruce Wayne, post parents murder and pre masked vigilante phase. You may remember young Mazouz from the recent Fox drama Touch starring Kiefer Sutherland, but based on the relative success of Touch, you probably don’t. Selina Kyle will be newcomer Camren Bicondova, whose character description matches what would have happened to Little Orphan Annie if she had never met Daddy Warbucks. All of this remains incredibly exciting. If you had told any version of my younger self that in 2014 there would be a new Muppet movie release, a new U2 album (not yet announced, but it should be here by the end of summer), a movie directed by Christopher Nolan (bring it, Interstellar), and a new Batman live action series, I would have asked if I had died and gone to heaven. For now, I am content with a trip to Gotham.
Television the night after the Oscars can often be a little bit anticlimactic. Apparently the following and diversified artists didn’t get the memo.
“Hey Kevin Durant. I am not going to give up that MVP so easily.” – LeBron James (hypothetically), after scoring 61 points against the Charlotte Hornets to-be
Gonzo stopped by Jimmy Kimmel to promote Muppets Most Wanted and discuss best practices for chicken relationships.
One night after the “Adele Dazeem” incident, Idina Menzel spent some time with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots playing kid instruments. Yes, she knows what it means to “let it go.”
Culture Challenged 