From during The Challenge XXX
BY DC CUEVA
Last week in that Challenge house, we saw Bananas go into his playbook and dust off something he hasn't done in quite a while: apply Super Glue to a bunch of feathers and stick them to the face of the first person to snore in his room. This was the same prank he pulled on Derrick and got a rather hot reception from what was his teammate on this week's mission, and this time he pulled it on Tony, though the reception was heated but didn't escalate into what happened on The Ruins. That latest trick by Johnny offers the bridge to this week's first piece of ExtraTime, and for this story we have to go back a bit to the year of his first Challenge win and a cast who we last saw on MTV a long time ago.
In 2008, The Challenge/Real World franchise followed the lead of one of my mom's favorite cable channels Bravo and expanded its main reality TV franchise (and ultimately its entire reality slate) to one hour. This meant a reduction of episodes from over 20 half-hour episodes to about 13 hours, and in the case of The Challenge that meant seeing all of the competition and drama jam-packed into weekly appointment TV, as does Are You The One. In the case of Real World and other docuseries like Teen Mom and Siesta Key, it has allowed for more time to focus on the roommates and deeper into their storylines over those 60 minutes, sometimes featuring more of them too.
After The Gauntlet III became the first MTV reality series to expand to one hour nine years ago, Hollywood hosted that first hour-long Real World season - Season 20 afterwards, which saw the show return to Los Angeles and to its roots of following those with aspirations on the entertainment & media world. We saw Joey Kovar deal with alcohol which he would succumb to a few years later, a romance between a Detroit music producer and a Real World alum, and racism even invade the house for a time too. And who can forget being able to head to MTV.com each day for those juicy dailies clips seeing all of that uncensored footage from the house too?
With him being the last to arrive in the house (CBS' former West Coast headquarters and where the LA operations of Viacom are now located in), that position put him in a precarious position that the rest of his roommates knew what he was thanks to having seen him on the web, but he had no idea about them either. Once he moved in, the man who called himself "The Chosen One" found himself as the odd man out in a group that had already clicked and stated no ambitions to get close to Briana, Kim or Sarah - the three female roommates in Stage 20, though he did give the guys a tutorial on doing wall flips.
However, there came a mystery in the house of who left a bloody napkin and a trail of rocks in the room of roommates Dave and Will, and who left $100 bills on Greg's bed? It was a strategy by him to try and get a laugh from the roommates for pranks that he himself pulled off, but unfortunately it backfired. And a few weeks in, the roommates had gotten tired of his antics, and several of them got into verbal jarring with Greg over his arrogance -- and in one instance before Joey returned to the house after his stint in rehab, Will and Dave got in a heated verbal fight with Greg that almost got them sent home in almost the same manner that we saw Tony and Camila get the heave-ho from Rivals III for similar reasons with no punches being thrown.
Along with that, Season 20's group assignment was doing improvisation comedy at a local club in Hollywood, which was memorably invaded by the always entertaining Andy Dick. At first, Greg was excited about getting out of that comfort zone and trying something new, but then he realized that it was impeding on his fashion ambitions, and he didn't go to either the first show the roommates attended when they began, showed up late for a second session for just getting a haircut without letting his teacher know about it, and third he didn't make it to the group's first performance in front of a live audience. For this instance, it was three strikes and out for Greg, which saw him being fired from his task, and also meant that he was kicked out of the house. And the experience ended so badly for him he wasn't present for the season-ending reunion to perhaps get into fights with his castmates.
Just like those who have had to endure a lot of hate, Greg has been left in hiding for some time after that Real World season ended, but thanks to Instagram he has emerged from that exile and has been posting stuff on there too. And it was just recently that a fan of The Real World and The Challenge, Drew Scott, tracked him down for an exclusive interview which you can listen at The Drew Scott Show site. Some of the stuff we've found out about him is that for the ladder half of last year, he went across to Russia (no word on whether it relates to what's been happening in the past year), did stuff for Comedy Central's Tosh.O, and pay attention to his last two IG posts with that low voice.
- I AM DC
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