I remember back to the early days of The Challenge. People used to be upset that only half of the cast, the ones who survived longer in the game, was invited to the reunion. Now, with Dirty Thirty and Vendettas, we’ve been everyone get invited. But really does it add anything to the show?
I think back to the first half of the Dirty Thirty reunion, because the reunion had to be cut into two halves. We relived the Shane and Simone drama and heard from Darrell. These topics seems so far removed from the episodes we were watching, meanwhile viewers are waiting for a winner to be announced.
Vendettas isn’t much different. I will say, the first half of the reunion wasn’t exclusively focused on old drama. There was a lot of discussion about the notes, Banana’s hook up, and random Twitter beef. While this is going on, people like Alicia and Cory are just sitting around waiting to talk. Some of the discussions were interesting, but they’ve already been talked about. What we haven’t seen in a winner. At this point, the viewers are still waiting to see who won.
Over the past 10 seasons or so, MTV had a pretty good reunion format. The reunions focused on the major themes from the season while neglecting the smaller drama from early cast members. For people who cared, they had the Aftershow. Dirty Thirty changed this, and newer seasons seem to be taking a page from the Bad Girls Club and trying to draw out reunions to be as long as possible.
I will say, this seems unnecessary to me. We’ve already heard these topics discussed at length. People want to know the winner of the show, and there’s not a lot of people who want to be talking about the first round of Mercenaries… again.
On the plus side, MTV does seem to be really invested in The Challenge at this point, so that shows promise for the future. I just don’t want to be sitting around waiting for hours while we talk about 12-episode-old drama.
Stop Being Polite 