YES, THE OTHER SASHA COHEN: One of my favorite ALOTT5MA Awards to consider each year is the one for Best Reality Competition Challenger, which went in 2004 to TAR5's Caviar Challenge and in 2005 to Survivor 10's Tom and Ian on the Buoys.
Nominees in 2006 include TAR9's "statute with extra pieces", "messenger or maiden" in Tokyo and the final task of getting the flags in order; American Idol 5's week where they had to sing something by Queen and not come off as complete douchebags; and ANTM6's "runway twirl"and ANTM7's "celebrity couple photoshoot", which was the coolest to watch, but not necessarily the hardest to compete in.
One early favorite, Tuesday Night Book Club's "read and discuss Good In Bed", was disqualified on the basis of the fact that we never saw any of the women reading the book. And almost anything from Treasure Hunters could be nominated, but it became really difficult to trust the producers to believe the contestants weren't occasionally getting other hints -- though seriously, yo, those were some ridiculously tough and cool challenges.
Two runners-up, both from Project Runway: season two's "design a figure skating outfit for Sasha Cohen" and season 3's "rip off the walls" opener. Either of them was worthy of winning this thing, but I like to be contrarian, though if you want to believe that Sasha Cohen finally wins a gold medal through this award, I won't complain.
Instead, this award goes, collectively, to the challenges from "Who Wants To Be A Superhero?", a show whose concept was too weird and stupid to actually work -- except that it did -- mostly by having hidden moral challenges in almost every task: change into your secret costume in public and run across a park (but don't miss the girl screaming for mommy!); sending the superheroes to a local cafe to grab lunch for the crew (but don't reveal your secret identity!); etc. Want to have fun? Watch episode three, where they think they're walking on a balance beam over a 20 foot drop betwen buildings to rescue a damsel-in-distress, when they're actually right on the ground.
Producers and writers are the hidden heroes of reality tv -- as we saw with The Scholar, a great concept can be ruined by lousy challenges, but a weird (even laughable) concept can be redeemed by well-designed ones. I had no interest in this show until Matt and TPE pushed me to watch, and quality like this is truly heroic.
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