How did The Challenge USA start its season? A recap of the premiere

The Challenge was once a must-watch for me, but over time I lost interest, and then became repulsed by its toxicity.

But the CBS reality star cast of The Challenge: USA—from its winners to the “that person, really?” players—drew me in to the new CBS version, and I liked this considerably better than The Challenge: All Stars’ first episode or any of the MTV seasons I’ve dipped in and out of in recent years.

During “The United States of Challenge,” a 90-minute premiere which followed another toxic show I’m just skipping this year as a viewer because it will never ever change, I went from kinda bored to fully engaged, with periodic frustration over the production’s choices.

Let’s get that out of the way first: The Challenge’s production is—comparatively speaking, and I say this with as much precision as possible—hot garbage. Moving to CBS didn’t change that.

Compared to The Amazing Race, Survivor, and Tough As Nails, its cinematography feels low-rent. The confessionals shot against a green screen look particularly fake, while cameras seem to miss conversations.

While TJ Lavin has his charms and his air horn, he’s still such an awkward host compared to Jeff Probst or Phil Keoghan.

My bad memory and I do, however, love that production provides players with branded shirts with their names on them.

Then there are the challenges.

Survivor plans challenges for months; The Challenge feels like it slaps its together in a few days and never tests them. (I hope they actually do.)

Over its history, MTV’s Challenge has consistently had injuries, DQs, and unfair situations—far more than other shows, which all involve risks, of course. MTV takes this as “proof” of how fucking awesome its signature show is.

Because I can’t imagine anyone wanting to intentionally hurt the contestants, I imagine it’s a budget issue, and that they’re working with more limited resources.

Don’t take my word for it about the shoddy production: Here’s cast member and Survivor winner Tyson Apostol on The Pod Has Spoken offering some shade about how Survivor is far superior behind-the-scenes: “Any other challenge show you can think of, Survivor does it bigger, better, and more proficient, and more professional, than any other crew out there.”

Heh, “challenge show.” Tyson also said the “Survivor challenge team is the best at building, and putting together, and creating sick challenges when they need to.”

Survivor’s challenges certainly have gotten repetitive and stale—if only they’d repeat some of the early season challenges!—and that’s why I think Tough As Nails has the best challenges now.

Anyway, Danny told us his wife told him “come back, don’t die,” which is a few steps closer to the truth than it needs to be.

But speaking of Danny: Wow, is this a great cast, because of both individuals and its mix of people.

It’s odd, in a good way, to see CBS reality stars—including winners like Sarah Lacina, Tyson Apostol, James Wallington—in this MTV show context.

In the premiere, we didn’t get to meet them while they’re doing something—building a shelter, waiting at an airport—but instead while they hung around the warehouse house.

It was 16 full minutes before a challenge showed up on The Challenge—and it’s a version of a challenge from The Mole season 2.

There were fragments of information. Xavier insisted he wasn’t part of The Cookout alliance, which is a curious choice, since he’s there with three of the Cookout members.

Shan said something that seemed to respond to the criticism she’s gotten from Survivor: “When I play Uno, when I play Monopoly, I’m not playing as a pastor, I’m playing as Shan, a person who’s competitive.”

Was that mingling and sharing exciting to watch? Eh. But it got better.

The format for the season is simple: Each player starts with $1,000 and has to earn $5,000 to even compete in the final challenge. They can earn money by winning challenges or elimination face-offs.

The ultimate prize is $500,000 and a spot on the Paramount+ global Challenge series. I’m assuming there will be multiple winners and/or people who win their way onto that show.

The first challenge took place on the side of a building in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is hosting this season.

It was called “Down to Do the Math,” and if you’ve seen The Mole 2, then you’ve seen a version of this challenge. As is true with nearly everything else, The Mole did it better.

The players paired up, which started getting interesting, as people with preexisting relationships (Danny and Shan, Cashel and Kyra) and people from different shows (Angela and Tyson) created mini-alliances.

Together, each pair had to rappel down the side of a building, past numbers and mathematical symbols, and do the math as they descended. They had three chances to identify the answer; if they got it wrong, they had to run 22 flights of stairs back up and rappel again.

Each player in the fastest team won $5,000 for winning, meaning they’re already in the final after episode one, which is like getting to the final Tribal Council after finding an idol, oh shit I just gave Jeff Probst another bad idea.

They also won the ability to be HOH and pick who’d go into elimination with the slowest team.

While I’m sure this was a tough challenge, between the heights and the math and climbing stairs, there was nothing visually interesting about it. The editors just showed us the equations, and while the players had to turn large gears to indicate the correct answer, they could have just as easily said the number and it would have not been any different.

Alyssa noted “how intense these challenges are” which I translated as roughly: how bad the producers are at their jobs.

After the very first challenge, Azah became dehydrated and passed out, and Kyland had to carry her to a shady area. Water, anyone? Medic? Concern from anyone on the production staff? Or is that not in the budget?

Angela and Tyson won; Azah and Kyland were in the elimination against whoever Angela and Tyson chose. (For losing, they got $1,000, which seems generous, because lose four more times and they’re in the final, too.)

Now it was time for strategy. My favorite!

Would Tyson and Angela give immunity to people from their own shows, Survivor and Big Brother? If so, that left just three teams for them to send into elimination, meaning that kind of alliance cannot last long.

Tyson and Angela did go that way, settling on Shannon (“there’s people that want to be here more than her,” Angela said) and James (who’d represent the “least blood on our hands” because there are fewer Amazing Race players).

With no Challenge history to fall back on, it makes sense that the players would align—and pre-game, I’m sure—with people from their show.

It’s not super-interesting strategy, though; it’s safe. It only lasted a few minutes, and then we cut to scenes of partying, though very watered down for this TV-PG rated CBS show.

I was ready to write off James and Shannon the second the editors included a childhood photo of James and he said:

“Growing up, because I was an effeminate gay man, I was very underestimated. But when I started to step into my power and really accept who I was, I found a new competitive streak in me. Because my knowledge of reality TV, I know how all these people operate, and that’s going to help me do what I came here to do: divide and infiltrate.”

I was rooting for him—yes! make something happen!—but the show cut immediately to players walking to the elimination challenge arena, meaning no strategy talk, and I assumed no traction.

After lots of footage of walking—The Challenge: USA really stretched to fill 90 minutes—Tyson and Angela announced their picks:

Cely and Javonny from Love Island. What?!

In flashback, we saw James working people, planting ideas and shoring up support. “I want to be here, I want to play the game,” he told Tyson, and then told us Tyson is “always going to think what is going to help me get to the end.”

Why we didn’t get that footage instead of party footage, I don’t know. A quick flashback montage wasn’t enough to really illustrate how James managed to get Tyson and Angela to change their minds.

But they did, and that meant Kyland and Azah faced off against Cely and Javonny.

I don’t like the elimination challenges that are simply about brute strength, so it was a good one.

First, they competed as teams, not in same-sex face-offs, as MTV’s The Challenge loves to do.

For the first elimination challenge., “Knot So Fast,” they were tied together and to a huge 250-foot rope. Together, they had to climb in and out of a metal pyramid that looked like a pointier version of that thing from 1980s playgrounds, creating knots that were difficult to unravel.

The team that unraveled the other team’s rope fastest would win, and get the losers’ bank account. A really decent challenge, and one that gave them a chance to be strategic and use physicality, though strength alone wouldn’t decide it.

Kyland and Azah easily won, not that the task was easy.

That’s when TJ Lavin walked away from the teleprompter to reveal this season’s big twist: “the algorithm,” which will “randomly select your new teammates every elimination.”

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t believe for a second that thing is random, and it is most certainly not powered by an “algorithm.”

However, I do like the idea of shuffling the teams, which will likely force more strategy in future episodes. Those who were comfortable in their partnerships were clearly shocked.

At the same time, the “this season on” segment focused almost exclusively on the challenges themselves, as did this episode, so I’m curious if The Challenge: USA is going to lean away from Big Brother and Survivor and toward Tough As Nails when it comes to the balance of time spent on challenges versus everything else.

But thanks mostly to James actually doing something interesting, I’ll keep watching to see how everything unfolds, and how these players navigate this particular game.