This review was commissioned by Eamonn over on my Ko-fi account.
Real ones know that I’m a reality TV nut.
Growing up in the early 2000s meant that I was hit at the exact right cultural moment of television to develop powerful attachments to the most famous of the reality TV competition franchises. The big two from CBS, Survivor and The Amazing Race, would be the ones that I’m most loyal to. I’m still a regular watcher of both shows, even as the seasons have dipped and peaked in quality through the years. But those two shows basically opened the floodgates to a whole variety of lifelong preoccupations. It was a natural lead in to my personal favorite TV show of all time (across all genres, come at me you Prestige TV nerds), The Mole, and I’ve lost myself in the Gordon Ramsey rabbithole of food shows more than I can count at this point. Hell’s Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares (UK and American), MasterChef US, you fucking name it and I’m there.
That also means that I’ve sampled my fair share of trash. And I say that lovingly because it is very much my kind of trash. The TLC variety of freak show never really crossed my path too often, but games were always my thing. If it had some form of way to determine a winner or a loser, I must have sampled it at some point. I’m talking about things like For Love or Money, Beauty and the Geek, and of course, Tough Enough.
I’m certain that I’ve watched the entirety of that first season years ago. It’s basically the perfect intersection of the two most American artforms: pro wrestling and reality TV.
In the broad strokes, Tough Enough is always meant to be a competition-style show. The show tells us that there’s going to be winners: one man and one woman that win WWF contracts. That’s probably much more clearer in its reboot which follows a more traditional episodic challenge/elimination format. This first season in 2001 though comes across a little more formless. It seems to exist in that weird space when the “reality” aspect of a show like this meant a little more. In pro wrestling terms, there’s a stronger sense of “kayfabe” mattering here that would eventually be shed in later years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here saying that everything in shows like this or later on is entirely scripted. In competition shows, the level of production intervention and “staging” does vary. You feel it heavier on some shows than others. With talent-based competitions like Tough Enough especially, where subjective judging is the be all, end all, production’s thumb leans a lot heavier on the scale than something like The Amazing Race which has an objective outcome players need to achieve.
Stylistically though, this first season of Tough Enough is very loose with regards to the “competition” aspect. Episode 3, “Jason Crumbles,” for example, has no real competitive aspect to it whatsoever. At no point do the contestants have to achieve an objective challenge, there’s no mechanic for how the casting pool gets whittled down. Instead “Jason Crumbles,” and much of the first season as a whole, presents itself more in a faux-documentary style. It’s much more about placing the contestants under the strain of a pro wrestling boot camp and then seeing how they react and endure the pressures of it.
There is no real “game” to be played.
Enter The Game.
The centerpiece to this episode of Tough Enough sees all the young hopefuls seated in their training facility as Triple H comes in to give them a real talking to. This is perhaps the most iconic scene from the whole season, there’s a reason that this commission was initially just for this particular scene. In it, Triple H plays the role of hard ass veteran explaining to these impressionable kids just how important the Biz is and giving them an idea of the sacrifices they’ll need to make if they want to get by.
From a purely objective standpoint, Hunter’s not wrong here. It is a tough business and it’s good to know that from the outset. Not only will these hopefuls have to endure constant physical strain and risk, but the emotional and mental hurt of being constantly on the road and separated from your family is something we’ve heard hundreds of pro wrestlers speak on through the years. From a broad strokes perspective, it’s a true speech with a lot of great lessons that those participating really should need to dwell on if they want to purse a career in pro wrestling, especially at the level to be expected in the WWE.
The speech is also fucking hilarious.
There’s a reason that this scene is so well-remembered and constantly memed even to this day. It’s that as much as Triple H is speaking truth here, the combination of the presentation, editing, and the fact that it’s Triple H speaking creates this tightly focused piece of hilarity.
Take for example how Hunter gets introduced via the contestant confessionals. Greg tells us, “I saw the beard and the ponytail and I was like, holy shit, it’s Triple H.” Something about that line just kills me. Imagining Greg at home listening to Motorhead on Monday nights, just waiting to see the true identifiers of The Game: that beard and the ponytail.
Then there’s Triple H making the contestants do flat back bumps, before commenting that Daryl’s balls are hanging out of his shorts. That moment is famous enough, but perhaps an underrated little cherry on top of that is that in the “Exclusive Footage” that I believe came with the show’s DVD release, there’s a totally unrelated moment a couple of minutes later where the cameraman just zooms straight in on Daryl’s junk while Triple H talks about something else entirely.
There’s a couple more golden interactions towards the end of this too. We get the sadly traditional bit of an established Attitude Era star questioning a female trainee about their pro wrestling fandom, as if some of the best stars in the history of the craft didn’t get into it just because they were big dudes who saw it as a way to make money. But then we get a hilarious inverse where Hunter asks Maven about his motivations, to which Maven’s giving a fairly decent response. Clearly only trying to make a point though, Hunter cuts him off to interject, “THE FAME? THE GLORY? WANNA GET LAID?” Wouldn’t be offering that kind of thing out in public if I had the kind of family you did, Mr. Levesque.
The real point of the segment becomes much clearer with the deleted footage, which I can only assume was added in the DVD release.
Hunter singles out two of the contestants to do a physical demonstration with. Simple enough thing, throw a punch, sell a punch. On the one hand, it’s easy for me to make some kind of crack of it being just like Triple H to want a couple of trainees to sell for him on a TV show. But there’s something more going on under the surface here that doesn’t really translate without the context of the full episode.
One of the contestants singled out as part of the demonstration is the titular Jason. As you can tell by the title of the episode, he’s something of a main character this episode. The show opens with the other contestants saying in confessionals how intimidating his focus and ability in the gym is. He has the best muscular physique of anyone on the show after all. In the ring with Triple H though, he’s asked to sell a few worked punches. Hunter is, fairly enough, unhappy with the results. “If you sell like that in the ring, I’d tag you for real,” he lectures.
That’s fair enough, but then in the deleted footage we get to see a clearer reason of why Jason gets singled out here.
Some time earlier in the show, Jason was caught with a poster of Goldberg in his room. We even get a dramatic recap of Taz having to rip the poster of the wall. And then it all starts to fall into place when Hunter just goes off on Goldberg. Just this long tirade about Goldberg not having no commitment to the business, never paying his dues, getting everything handed to him in his short time in the business. Hunter delivers it with all the bitterness of a man who had to eat shit in 1996 because his best friends did a booboo.
It’s all bad faith bullshit about Goldberg, of course. At this point, he’s already had the DDP match that’s comfortably better than maybe 95% of Hunter’s output ever, and I wouldn’t blink an eye at saying it’s better than anything Hunter’s ever down. On the other side of history, Goldberg has more outshining Hunter to do too. Do you think Triple H lies awake at night thinking about how Goldberg has a better WrestleMania match than any Hunter’s ever had in his career?
I sure hope he does.
The Triple H segment is so important to the episode though because it really does strike a chord with Jason. The rest of the episode (outside of a weird showmance subplot with Nidia and Chris that ends in…Chris not respecting her consent when trying to dunk her head under the hot tub water???) follows Jason’s emotional journey in the house. He’s in a new relationship, he intentionally keeps himself respectfully distanced from all the woman so that none of them get the wrong idea, and he misses his family and loved ones at home.
At the end of the episode, he decides to leave the process to be closer to his people. Without any other form of elimination ceremony, Al Snow ends up folding the chair he sits on in the class and leans it up against the wall as a sort of symbol of him falling I guess.
Honestly, good for Jason. The show makes him out to be a nice guy if a little guarded, and it’s probably all the best that he was able to leave all of this behind him while he still had the chance.
That would be its own nice, neat dramatic arc for an episode to end on, right? One of the contestants realizes he can’t stand the pressure and moves from the show. In lieu of some sort of competition-driven elimination, a rather natural whittling down of the cast happens instead, one that hypothetically reflects the realities of the pro wrestling industry as a whole. That’d be a cool thing to end on, if somewhat bittersweet.
Nah, fuck you, Jason.
Instead, the WWF decides to rub a little salt in the wound by showing a title card to end the show telling us that Triple H blew out his quad but finished a match like a goddamn pro. Just a little reminder that Triple H is the best and the coolest and that this Jason nerd couldn’t take the fucking heat.
Never change, fed propaganda.
I hope Jason’s doing okay somewhere. At least he didn’t have a career two decades too long that gets progressively worse after blowing out his quads on national TV.
