Due to the heavy presence of graphics and video, "Who Are These Newbies?" is best experienced on desktops and fast-performing mobile devices.
DCBLOG has 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 in the past week we've introduced to newcomers from the Shore franchise and other reality shows to the just-premiered All-Star Shore on Paramount+. Now, we begin our most extensive series of rookie posts yet, covering our most widely covered show on here as it begins yet another brand new era.
On this Fourth of July Monday, this week is a big one in what this site likes to refer to as "Challenge Nation" -- this thing that revolves around the world of
MTV's The Challenge. Come Wednesday, the season finale of Season 3 of
All-Stars will be streaming on Paramount+, while later that night comes the debut of the reality franchise's first foray into network television entitled
The Challenge: USA, as CBS reality show alumni get to compete in a brand new iteration of the show you love, being made available to anyone with an antenna along with streaming on Paramount+ and the CBS app.
It's hard to fathom what network television would've been like had CBS decided to pass on trying to regain lost viewers by gambling on a genre that, until the year 2000, was the domain of the competition and networks that had a younger median age than someone half the age of Bob Barker. But that summer proved to be the start of CBS' renaissance in no small part due to adding two reality shows that would eventually become the cornerstone of not only their network, but also of an entire company when it and MTV went under the same corporate umbrella not just once, but now twice.
The additions of Big Brother and Survivor -- coupled with regaining NFL rights and the change of ownership of Viacom -- helped to turn around the fortunes of the Eye network. And the year after the debut of those shows -- the ladder becoming America's #1 show and the former being retooled after a disasterous first season, CBS strived to build upon those successes with adding a third reality show to its schedule. They asked CSI boss Jerry Bruckheimer and producers Elise Doganieri and Bertram van Munster to conceive a show that was different in many ways from those two shows above.
The concept was simply this: a dozen teams go on a race around the world to big cities and small nations to decode clues, navigate unfamiliar foreign areas and do all sorts of tasks all while taking any form of transportation they could find to get from one leg to another. The concept became The Amazing Race, which debuted in September 2001, and whose host is one who's used to notching all those frequent flier miles as Phil Keoghan was a "road warrior" on a morning show of an FX channel many years away from American Horror Story, Sons of Anarchy and Nip/Tuck.
It may not have the kind of big number of viewers that once tuned into a Survivor episode in its early years, or the enormous social media buzz that will soon accompany Season 24 of Big Brother when it debuts this week. But even with it being juggled around the CBS schedule all these years, The Amazing Race does have something prestigious: the love of the members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The voting members of the organization that hands out the Primetime Emmy Awards every fall have, ten times, given TAR its Outstanding Reality Competition Series statuette.
For us Challenge fans, we all remember what happened to its first contestant to cross over to our world with Jenn Lee on Total Madness... a mention of UFO's will have to do there. But this time around, three alumni who've also been in that experience of going traveling around the world will try to do much better than her as they take on the big task of playing with America's best. And after the break, "Who Are These Newbies?" introduces the trio coming to The Challenge: USA from The Amazing Race.
