“America’s Funniest Home Videos” no more need its viewers’ support and participation to keep the show running. The rib tickling show can simply play episodes of ABC’s new painfully funny reality series “Wipeout,” inspired from the Japanese-style game shows to keep its viewers glued and laughing while the contestants fall flat on their faces.
If you’re a sucker for slapstick then the show won’t disappoint you a bit. This reality T.V game show is full of embarrassment and good-spirited humiliation. The show has trademarked stunts and pratfalls of the Japanese game-shows and has in store cash for winners, humiliation for losers and laughs for the viewers. Here, each week twenty-four thrill-seekers of all ages, shapes and sizes compete head-to-head at four rounds of grueling and physically demanding but wildly hilarious extreme obstacle course designed to provide the most spills, crashes, smashes, mud splashes and wipeouts ever seen on television. In the end, only one contestant takes home prize of $50,000, after wiping out everyone else at show’s hallmark over-the-top obstacles like “Dizzy Dummy,” the “Big Balls,” and “The Dreadmill.”
What make it utterly amusing is the “lingering close-ups of contestants jiggling in Spandex, tripping across a narrow platform next to a wall from which boxing gloves jab, knocking them into a muddy lake, and flailing – and falling across four enourmous rubber contraptions called the Big Balls” along host John Henson, John Anderson and Jill Wagner’s jokes and hilarious one-liners. The show comes up with unbelievably unique challenges thus distinguishing it from array of similar shows. So, while ABC redefines entertainment this summer, we watch people crash and burn, in the name of entertainment.
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