Wednesdays, it seems, have become TV’s designated tough days.
This fall, “Survivor” and “Amazing Race” had ordinary folks facing extraordinary challenges. Now come two more shows; they overlap on Jan. 4, then share the night:
— CBS’ “Tough as Nails” is 9-11 p.m. the first week, then 10 p.m.. Regular folks – a carpenter, welder, firefighter, construction worker, etc. — face demanding, blue-collar tasks.
— Fox’s “Special Forces: The World’s Toughest Test”is 8-10 p..m. the first week, then 9 p.m. “It is actual Special Forces training, without votes, alliances or eliminations,” Dwight Howard (shown here, second from right) said in a Television Critics Association press conference. “You just have to survive.”
That’s something the body nudges you into, Mike Piazza said.. “When you get to a point of pure exhaustion, then you go into some alternative survival mode.”
Those two might seem qualified for survival. Piazza holds baseball’s career record for home runs by a catcher; Howard was three times named basketball’s best defensive player.
Before this started, Howard said, he was thinking: “’I’m in good shape. I have thick skin. I’ve had tough coaches my whole life. So what’s a drill sergeant? How real can this get?’ Turns out, incredibly real and incredibly hard.”
The show also has athletes from football (Danny Amendola), skiing (Gus Kenworthy), gymnastics (Nastia Liukin) and soccer. Carli Lloyd, who kicked the gold-medal-winning goals in two Olympics, said nothing prepared her for this. “It was literally surviving one minute, one hour, one day.”
It if was tough for them, then imagine what it was like for people without an athletic regimen. Consider people known for reality TV (Kate Gosselin, Hannah Brown, Kenya Moore, Dr. Drew Pinsky). Or chef Tyler Florence or actresses Beverley Mitchell and Jamie Lynn Spears. Think about Mel B (that’s Scary Spice in the Spice Girls) or Anthony Scaramucci, once a White House official for Donald Trump.
Then there’s singer Montell Jordan, who flatly says he’s “anti-athletic.”
Jordan found himself in (appropriately) Jordan, on the move. It’s difficult, he said, to understand “what a 30-pound rack rack that we’re carrying around through the desert actually feels like while you’re running in 120-degree weather.”
He soon adjusted, Pinsky said: “Montell, afraid of heights, afraid of the water, dives out of a helicopter flying over the Red Sea.”
Mel B. sort of knew what to expect, because she was a fan of the British show this is based on. She figured it was “about time that I put myself in this kind of situation and hopefully I didn’t die. Well, I didn’t die; I just dislocated a knee and popped it back in.”
This is similar to the real training, but briefer, said Mark “Billy” Billingham, who spent two decades in the British SAS and received an MBE award from Queen Elizabeth. “We condense what we go through in six months down to about 10 to 12 days, and we start off at 200 miles an hour,”
During those days – roughly the length of Scaramucci’s White House job – people were in “a genuine camp in the middle of the Jordan desert,” said Rob Wade, Fox’s programming chief. “If you wanted to go to the (toilet), you had to go in a hole in the ground. You slept on a camp bed …. I was like: ‘How is (the 6-foot-10) Dwight Howard going to sleep? Like, he’s not going to fit on the bed.’”
That worry was soon dashed, Mel B. said. “Oh, he slept. We heard him sleep. We all heard him sleep.”