Jackass
MTV's notorious stunt-and-prank show, in which a crew of grown men hurt themselves for your entertainment. Premiering on October 1, 2000, it strung together shopping-cart crashes, ill-advised dares, and gross-out gags performed by Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, and the rest of the gang. Wrapped in stern on-screen warnings not to try any of it at home, it was appointment viewing for a generation of teenagers — and the launchpad for a movie franchise that's still going.
Jackass premiered on MTV on October 1, 2000, created by Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine, and Spike Jonze out of the skateboarding and prank-video culture of the late 1990s. The show had no plot and no point beyond the spectacle: a rotating cast — Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Ryan Dunn, Dave England, Ehren McGhehey, Jason "Wee Man" Acuña, Preston Lacy, and Brandon DiCamillo — performing pain-inducing stunts and pranks on each other and on unsuspecting bystanders. Every episode was bracketed by disclaimers, repeated before commercials and during the riskiest bits, flatly warning viewers that the stunts were dangerous and should not be imitated.
Those warnings did little to dampen the show's appeal — if anything, the danger was the draw. The stunts were controversial from the start, and MTV wrestled with how to air the show responsibly, but the sense of unsupervised mayhem only sharpened its outlaw appeal among the teenagers who made it a hit. The television series itself was short-lived, running three seasons from October 2000 through August 2001, with reruns carrying it into 2002.
The brand, however, proved far bigger than the show. Jackass jumped to theaters with Jackass: The Movie in 2002 and kept going for two decades — Jackass Number Two (2006), Jackass 3D (2010), the Bad Grandpa spin-off (2013), and Jackass Forever (2022) — turning a scrappy MTV experiment into one of the most improbably enduring comedy franchises of its era.
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