Who Are These Newbies? - The Challenge USA Season 2: The Amazing Race

Due to the heavy presence of graphics and video, "Who Are These Newbies?" is best experienced on desktops and fast-performing mobile devices.

BY DC CUEVA 

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For as long as we've been posting on here over the course of the past decade, DCBLOG has maintained a longstanding tradition of introducing those unfamiliar faces you're getting to see for the first time with what we call, "Who Are These Newbies?" -- our primer on first-time entrants to MTV Reality shows. We have focused on around 200 personalities since this site began in 2013... and it's a result of our vision that viewers watching these shows like yourselves shouldn't get to meet newcomers to these shows without us giving them their deserved treatment and introduction.

DCBLOG has had an unblemished record of doing these posts for every Challenge season until last spring -- and it's with things going on outside of this site that caused me to miss doing introductory bits on the international players who competed on the World Championship spinoff or some of the notable castmates from the return Are You The One? season. Need not worry, we plan to take care of doing those posts at a later date for the sake of those who haven't seen those just yet on Paramount+ during this TV offseason... but now, we go into doing this first installment for this second USA Challenge.

All Photos Courtesy Paramount & CBS

When the field of this year's second Challenge season on network television gathered in Croatia to kick matters off back on Thursday night -- and just as it was a year earlier down in Argentina, the cast makeup was the same both when the CBS alumni came onto the port, and after the MTV veterans invaded their party. That is in the fact that one show was far & away the least-represented of the entire group of competitors who have come to this European paradise to chase the $500,000 that goes to whoever comes away victorious come mid-autumn: that would be The Amazing Race.

As noted in our introductory post on that lonely trio of three who came to Season 1 of The Challenge USA last year, TAR is the one CBS reality show that feels like the lonely little brother who can't get the huge notoriety that Survivor and Big Brother get as far as garnering social media buzz, viewership and a consistent timeslot. It does, though, have so many more Emmy Awards to its credit, including ten statues for Outstanding Reality Competition Series and the Critics Choice Award for Best Reality Show for its most recent season. And those who have stayed loyal through all of this to watching FX Breakfast Time road warrior Phil Keoghan guide the teams on their journeys around the world are lucky to still be here as Road Rules' spiritual and well-traveled successor.

After the break, Part 1 of "Who Are These Newbies?" of The Challenge USA 2 introduces you to the duo who traveled the world during the midst of a pandemic, and who lived through that challenging experience to make it onto this new Challenge -- Dusty and Luis of the past couple seasons. Then: a follow-up on one of the players who competed on last year's CBS Challenge, and flew straight from Argentina to joining the ladder in last year's race around the world. But first, their introduction...

Inside MTV Reality: Welcome Back to The Challenge USA - Part Deux

BY DC CUEVA 

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In the words of Jim Nantz, we say "Hello Friends" and welcome back to DCBLOG, and to our tenth anniversary year Inside MTV Reality... it has been a while since we've spoken to you in this manner of covering the thing that we have followed the most on here in this last decade. For an obvious reason, it's personal: last month, my inner circle marked a year since the passing of my late dad... that life-changing experience and the increased role I've inherited as man of the house (and also, today in us saying goodbye to my aunt as she flies back home to the Philippines) has forced me to step away from this passion project and focus to the one thing that takes precedent above all else in my life: family. But now, we're set to resume matters on here... and we're glad to be back to doing what this site does best.

Exactly ten years have passed since we started covering the world of the most talked about shows of a genre that's been practically owned in the latter years of a cable channel that began its existence with wall-to-wall music videos forty-two years & ten days ago. Well, here we are in the summer of '23... and a lot has evolved since we began since this site first flickered on the blogosphere back in the summer of 2013. We know that a lot has taken place in the several months since we last covered an MTV show earlier this spring when we crowned new Challenge champs -- and that includes a new spinoff... and we'll catch up on those matters of The Challenge World Championship and the 2nd half of Season 9 of Are You The One? just to come on here as we go deep into the coming fall season.

(Jonne Roriz/Paramount)

As for now, we are set to go back to covering all the dealings in and around the MTV Reality world: later this evening sees the return of the sweetest of all sweethearts to grace our screens in Sammi on Jersey Shore. We are well into a new season of the show that saw Cheyenne extend this MTV crossover into the Teen Mom sorority, and there's even a new dating show among other things in The Love Experiment which premieres next week. And then, there's Season 2 of The Challenge USA, which tonight kicks off a year after the fifth major pro sport came to unchartered waters of primetime broadcast network television for the first time. Then as now, alumni of the CBS network's reality programming took on a whole new game that might be one thing to watch and enjoy but certainly a different animal when playing it.

Last season down in Argentina saw familiar faces from Survivor, The Amazing Race and Big Brother adopt from surviving the elements, traveling the world and living in enforced lockdown to playing our own game -- one that a few who have been on the former and the ladder have been able to master to a degree... and capped off by a rather controversial final act. But this time around, Season 2 promises to be a bit different in many ways -- some familiar faces who have been in both parts of being on network television and in cable-ville will be at it again, and joining them for this odyssey are even more familiar faces who are making their network television debut, and an assortment of Challenge rookies. And if things turn out the way they're supposed to, we should be in for quite the next few months ahead.

After the break -- and with just hours before it begins, DCBLOG brings you our first look at Season 2 of The Challenge: USA... and we'll also reacquaint you with not only this year's crop of contestants, but also that chaotic first season too. Welcome back Challenge Nation... it's good to have you with us again.

DCBLOG ExtraTime: Some Gravy & A Rich Shore Kid Come Walking Into a Club...

BY DC CUEVA 

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Instagram @YungGravy

Tomorrow night, the MTV Reality focus will turn to the show that became the most popular in the channel's history... and to something that's not happened in its second life since the last act of its original series a decade ago. When the Family Vacation relaunch of Jersey Shore took off back in the spring of 2018, one person was missing when the originals of Seaside Heights gathered back in Miami - and mostly out of fear that she might get into it again with her ex turned baby daddy... but that will change when Sammi "Sweetheart" Giancola will finally join in on the antics of the Sitch, Snooki & friends. And that leads us to this first installment of this fall 2023 cycle of ExtraTime, which has its roots in something a bit different from the land of fist pumps, but has a spiritual link to it of sorts.

In two of America's biggest pop culture events held fifty-one weeks apart in the month of February and in the same region, a homage was paid to the one musical genre that has influenced generations of fans and our modern American culture more than any other in hip-hop. In February 2022 in Inglewood, CA, Super Bowl LVI represented its biggest moment yet when Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and 50 Cent shared the stage with R&B queen Mary J. Blige at its halftime show, taking place in one of hip-hop's major hubs of Los Angeles. A year later up in downtown, the 2023 Grammys also gave an ode to the genre's 50th anniversary as LL Cool J, Run DMC and more legends took the stage... a long way from when it was shunned from the spotlight of "Music's Biggest Night."

Across the country is another hotbed of this world of Atlanta, Georgia, where the success of OutKast, Ludacris, Future, 21 Savage, T.I. and Lil' Jon led The New York Times to call the ATL "hip-hop's center of gravity." The city's hip-hop culture also serves as the basis of multiple Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning FX series Atlanta, which chronicles the lives of a pair of cousins as they try to navigate their rise up the ranks in the music industry, similar to Empire on former sibling FOX. And mirroring what has been happening the past decade, a number of artists who call North Georgia home have become active in local and national political movements, from Black Lives Matter to voting rights.

What do these two worlds of hip-hop and the MTV Shore franchise have in common? Last year, they collided for one weekend when the man at the heart of its most-recent addition got to party it up with one of its biggest stars to break out into the mainstream to celebrate a birthday... and all that star got to do was to sample someone who first made a name for himself some three decades ago. That's all part of that time when Some Gravy and a Rich Shore Kid Came Walking Into a Club...