Wipeout
Four giant red balls over a muddy pond, the Sucker Punch, the Sweeper, and two announcers mocking every contestant who got flattened. ABC's summer obstacle course, billed as the world's largest, premiered in June 2008 and became the thing the whole family watched in a heap on the couch, the champion walking away with $50,000 from the floodlit Wipeout Zone.
Created by Matt Kunitz and Scott Larsen and distributed by Endemol, Wipeout premiered on ABC on June 24, 2008, taped at Sable Ranch in Canyon Country, north of Los Angeles. Kunitz, who had also executive-produced Fear Factor, said he wanted a funny stunt series and reportedly pitched it as Fear Factor meets America's Funniest Home Videos. The original color commentator was replaced after the pilot, and the booth became John Henson, trading non sequiturs and puns, alongside John Anderson playing the straight play-by-play man, with Jill Wagner interviewing contestants down on the course. Each episode sent 24 people through a qualifier, cut the field across two bigger obstacles and brought the top four, later three, back at night for the Wipeout Zone, where the fastest time won $50,000.
The obstacles were the stars: the Sucker Punch, the Sweeper, the Dizzy Dummy, the Dreadmill and above all the Big Balls, four enormous red spheres that had to be crossed at a run and rejected almost everyone at odd angles into the water, mud, foam or vats of food below. On its first night it posted the highest premiere rating of any new show that summer, beating Hell's Kitchen and America's Got Talent, and ABC renewed it within weeks. A Wipeout Bowl of cheerleaders against male couch potatoes aired after the Super Bowl in 2009, producing the show's first female winner, Monica Kaufmann, and TV Week rated it the third most popular game show in the world that year. The second-season premiere drew 9.69 million viewers, the third 10.21 million, and the first Winter Wipeout in January 2011 set the series' ratings high. ABC called it the only recently launched broadcast reality series with "proven staying power."
The Japanese broadcaster Tokyo Broadcasting System sued ABC for copyright infringement, calling the show "a blatant copycat" of Takeshi's Castle and its cousins; Kunitz countered that it was "90% Fear Factor-inspired, 10% Japanese game show," and the suit was settled through mediation in December 2011. Activision released a run of Wipeout video games from 2010, and the format sold to more than 40 territories, with two courses built in Argentina for the international editions. The hundredth episode came in season six, a Tournament of Champions closed season seven on September 7, 2014, and a planned revamp was quietly dropped by the summer of 2015. The American cable channel TBS rebooted it in 2021 with John Cena, Nicole Byer and Camille Kostek.
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