T.J. Lavin, the host of MTV’s The Challenge, could only cackle as a tank he’d commandeered ran amok, drawing looks of anguish from those around him. Everyone aside from Lavin had been tasked with dragging heavy cargo across a 500-foot field, stopping only to solve a jigsaw puzzle and math equation. If Lavin caught up to the contestant and flattened their supplies, they were eliminated. It was a grisly yet welcome sight for those who watched the premiere of the 35th season of MTV’s The Challenge, which aired April 1, 2020, weeks after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was fittingly filmed in and around an isolated Cold War bunker in Prague months before “social distancing” entered the lexicon.
For a few months at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly every sports league around the world halted operations. That left sports fans starving for athletic content—you could only watch The Last Dance and reruns of classic games so many times.
In the peculiar early-pandemic era, the reality competition show in its fourth decade of existence qualified as the newest physical competition available to broadcast on television. And it filled that void quite successfully, premiering to its biggest audience for a season premiere in nearly 15 years.
