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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: June 22, 2011
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Challenge: Rivals, “Welcome to the Jungle” (Season 21, Episode 1). [Watch on Hulu.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Let’s make this clear right out of the gate: The Real World/Road Rules Challenge has always been great. Yes, even in its infancy, when it was called Road Rules All-Stars and it was just five Real Worlders in an RV; that was the season where Sean from Boston and Rachel from San Francisco met and fell in love and became Bunim-Murray’s first couple of conservatism! It was certainly good during its first golden age — the first Battle of the Seasons, Battle of the Sexes, Gauntlet, and Inferno — all of which should be as emblazoned onto the collective cultural memory as it is on to mine, or at the very least the parts where Belou left her baby by a glass door during a hurricane and Julie tried to kill Veronica on a high wire.
Nothing is ever going to top those first few Challenge seasons. If we want to talk about a second golden age of the Challenge, however, I would probably place it four years ago today, with the premiere of the 21st season, called Rivals. How we managed to get this far as a culture before realizing that teaming up Challenge veterans with their worst enemies was a goldmine of an idea is well beyond me.
The premiere episode of Rivals had pretty much everything you’d want/expect out of a Challenge episode: a fist-fight (such as it was, with Adam R. and Ty throwing no-contact haymakers at each other), a lot of shit-talking, some good old-fashioned storyline-building (the unexpected kinship of CT and Adam K.!). This particular episode even featured TJ Lavin’s grand return from a horrifying BMX accident that had left him comatose. Genuine, no-guilt emotion! From The Challenge!
The success of Rivals led to a wave of mismatched-partners seasons, including Battle of the Exes, another can’t-believe-it-took-20-plus-seasons-to-think-of-this concept. But I’m not sure that the purity of that first Rivals season can ever be topped.
[You can watch the Rivals premiere on Hulu.]
Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.
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