There are two things I realized Tuesday night as I watched the premiere of Wipeout, the show where contestants tackle obstacle courses that are, according to ABC’s website, “grueling and physically demanding but wildly hilarious”:
1. My husband will never tire of watching people get hurt. He loves any show whose title contains a phrase such as “funniest videos,” “outrageous videos” or “whacked-out videos.” When Wipeout started, he grabbed his plate from the dinner table and ate while standing in the middle of the family room, so he could get a better look at all the people getting hurt. If there were a show named People Getting Hurt, my husband would never miss an episode. If there were a network named People Getting Hurt, my husband would never sleep.
2. I’m more like my husband than I’d care to admit.
Seriously — after five seconds of Wipeout, I thought, “Boy, this is going to get old awfully fast.” But I kept watching. And laughing.
The first thing that got me hooked were those gigantic red rubber balls, which no one can successfully bounce across. Whenever I saw someone standing on the platform, about to leap onto that first ball, I had to watch (especially that woman who held her nose before she jumped, confident that she would fall off the balls and plunge in the water. You just know good TV’s coming).
Then the commentary kept me hooked. I was afraid there would be a lot of “Oooh — that’s gotta hurt” comments, and I have a very low tolerance for those. But I forgave any annoying comments when they called an older contestant’s “Yay — AARP!” cheer the “worst … shout-out … ever.”
Even the little quirky things cracked me up. The way the commentators reduced the contestants to certain attributes, such as their profession (nicknaming the dancer “Jazz Hands”) or their height (progressively making a tall contestant taller — he got up to more than 18 feet). That’s perfect — we don’t need to know the contestants’ life stories to watch them get whacked in the face by a punching board. And then there are those weird moments, like when that go-go dancer checked her nails during her timed final run, or when she took a breather in the middle of a hard-fought elimination round to look at her opponent and say “What’s up?” And after watching all this abuse and ridicule and silliness, I was surprised that I felt genuinely impressed by the contestants’ athleticism during the final round.
Other sites are proclaiming Wipeout to be anything from “the bad idea of the week” to “a sign of the apocalypse.”
I call it brilliant.