Part III in a series. Read Parts I and II.
By Eric Hoyt
In 2001, Endemol established a production hub in Buenos Aires to film the show “Fear Factor” for several different territories. Building one central studio for “Fear Factor” saved Endemol and its partners the cost of building elaborate sets in Egypt, Germany, Turkey and the other nations where the show would travel. Buenos Aires presented an ideal locale due to the city’s temperate climate, experienced production crews and devalued currency. Although the Argentine peso has stabilized since the early-2000s and the cost savings to Endemol have shrunk, the company has only expanded its Buenos Aires operations. Endemol recently built production hubs in Argentina for its new formats “101 Ways to Leave a Game Show,” a quiz show where losers are blasted out of cannons and sent careening into swimming pools, and “XXS” (Extra Extra Small), where contestants scrub the floors and perform other everyday chores in a house built for a giant.
The company’s most widely used production hub, though, is the sprawling set of obstacle courses for “Wipeout.” According to The Times of London, Endemol has flown out more than 5,000 contestants since 2008 to face challenges like the Sweeper and Sucker Punch on its Buenos Aires set. Despite the transportation and lodging costs, Endemol can produce episodes of “Wipeout” for just 30 percent of what it would cost to build sets and film locally in the 23 nations where “Wipeout” airs. (The United States is the only nation that doesn’t film “Wipeout” in Argentina—the U.S. domestic market can sustain its set in Southern California.)
By having a single set and cycling hundreds of contestants from dozens of different nations through it, Endemol would seem to have put an end to format localization. If the “Big Brother” houses in different countries demonstrate how production design can express culture (shrimp on the barbie for Aussies, gender-segregated sleeping quarters for Saudis), then how could a single set express anything remotely cultural?
“Wipeout” is a race around an elaborate series of courses, which contestants must successfully navigate despite the ever-increasing amount of absurd obstacles. The likelihood of a dramatic spill is ever-present. Surely, each nation’s format would look similar when the show’s contestants all move through this Buenos Aires compound like widgets through a factory. “Wipeout” may present a more wholesome and family friendly façade than the shamelessly voyeuristic “Big Brother,” but the show suffers from its own innocuous repetitiveness. Since every week of the American “Wipeout” is nearly indistinguishable from the last, how different could these foreign versions be?
Not very—at least, not the American, British and Australian versions. All three follow the same basic set-up, where 20 or so men and women compete and are gradually eliminated until the surviving finalists enter the Wipeout Zone. In this final stage, the contestants race through foamy pits and giant swinging hammers toward the cash prize ($50,000; £10,000; A$20,000). The show emphasizes humor over competition, adding cartoonish sound effects and slow motion replays to punctuate the spills. Often, the hosts (all male) turn it over to their “reporter” (always a young, attractive female) who interviews contestants in the field. This goes on for an hour. The next episode subjects a new group of 20 people to the same obstacles, falls and laughs.
The uniformity across the Anglo-“Wipeouts” is striking. The American, British, and Australian contestants complete the same obstacles; their falls, flips and spills are replayed in slow motion in precisely the same way. All the men beat their chests and yell before beginning the qualification round. Only the accents differ. British host Richard Hammond heckles the contestants with a bit more venom than his duller American counterparts, but even the commentators’ banter is all but indistinguishable. As Endemol USA President David Goldberg told The New York Times in 2008, “The whole idea of watching people crash and burn—but not get hurt—is something that people seem to be drawn to.” Perhaps Goldberg is right. Maybe there is something universally entertaining about men hitting themselves in the groin while attempting to jump atop a giant banana. And maybe that transcends all cultural and national boundaries. (Incidentally, the Tokyo Broadcasting System believes that Endemol’s “Wipeout” format illegally ripped off its obstacle course programs “MXC,” “Sasuke,” and “Kunoichi.” The lawsuit is ongoing.)
Sometimes, what we see on the screen in the various “Wipeouts” is essentially the same, but sometimes it’s different, and those differences are telling. Spain’s “¡Guaypaut!” carries a sexual charge absent from the Anglo versions of “Wipeout.” For starters, the show’s producers collapsed the commentator and reporter roles into one bombshell host, Carmen Alcayde. When Alcayde interviews contestants before entering the course, the show turns into a T&A parade. At one point, a buxom contestant dances so hard her bikini top falls off. The network’s censor blur flashes, but little is left to the imagination.
On the Arabic satellite channel MBC 1—the flagship MBC channel whose sister station MBC 2 killed the “Big Brother” spinoff, “The Boss”—Middle Eastern audiences can watch a woman wearing a hijab headscarf topple over the identical obstacles, the exact same course, in fact, as Miss Bikini. One contestant wore a tracksuit under her hijab to cover her skin, leaving only her face and hands exposed, yet no amount of garments could protect her from the blow of the Sucker Punch, a wall armed with boxing gloves that randomly spring out and strike, like whack-a-moles with a vengeance. Probably two-thirds of the female contestants—particularly the younger women—opt to wear tank tops, shorts and elastic hair bands instead of the traditional garb. But the show presents all the male and female contestants more or less the same as they move through the course. Endemol’s earlier programs “Big Brother” and “Star Academy”—a sort of “Big Brother”-“Pop Idol” hybrid where hopeful male and female stars live, train, and compete in the same house—both contained ikhtilat, the mixing of genders, that made the formats inflammatory to moral conservatives when they were imported into the Middle East.
“Star Academy,” which satellite broadcasts from the more socially liberal LBC (Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation), has achieved enormous popularity among young Arabic speaking audiences during its seven season run, even as some Saudi clerics denounce it as “Satan Academy.” With “Wipeout,” Endemol created a format that could be easily appropriated for family-friendly MBC 1. Every episode is a one-off. There are no erotic tensions to continue among contestants from week to week, nor do such tensions ever have the chance to spark in a show where contestants primarily interact with genderless moving padded objects. Yet tameness can have its price. The first season of “Wipeout” on MBC 1 generated little of the audience enthusiasm surrounding LBC’s “Star Academy.” It is unclear when or if the next batch of pan-Arab contestants will fly out to Buenos Aires to face the Sucker Punch.
Next, in the final installment of Watching the World Watch TV explains why "Wipeout" in Ukraine is deadly serious.
Eric Hoyt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Critical Studies Division of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.