In an attempt to appeal to a wider breadth of demographic than The Ultimate Fighter, MTV has created a new reality show that is loosely based around the MMA aspirations of a group of small town Louisiana kids.
The show is basically 16 and Pregnant and the “babies” they are expecting are their upcoming fights. Truth be told, the concept is a good one since it’s more “reality” TV than TUF has become and most of us will likely be able to convince our spouses and girlfriends to watch a show like this one strictly for the train wreck factor. The fact that it will air immediately after Jersey Shore on Mondays and prior to the JS rebroadcast will mean big numbers for the show — maybe even more than TUF 15 on Fox.
(Video courtesy of MTV)
In an attempt to appeal to a wider breadth of demographic than The Ultimate Fighter, MTV has created a new reality show that is loosely based around the MMA aspirations of a group of small town Louisiana kids.
The show is basically 16 and Pregnant and the “babies” they are expecting are their upcoming fights. Truth be told, the concept is a good one since it’s more “reality” TV than TUF has become and most of us will likely be able to convince our spouses and girlfriends to watch a show like this one strictly for the train wreck factor. The fact that it will air immediately after Jersey Shore on Mondays and prior to the JS rebroadcast will mean big numbers for the show — maybe even more than TUF 15 on Fox.
The demos the show will undoubtedly resonate with include:
In an attempt to appeal to a wider breadth of demographic than The Ultimate Fighter, MTV has created a new reality show that is loosely based around the MMA aspirations of a group of small town Louisiana kids.
The show is basically 16 and Pregnant and the “babies” they are expecting are their upcoming fights. Truth be told, the concept is a good one since it’s more “reality” TV than TUF has become and most of us will likely be able to convince our spouses and girlfriends to watch a show like this one strictly for the train wreck factor. The fact that it will air immediately after Jersey Shore on Mondays and prior to the JS rebroadcast will mean big numbers for the show — maybe even more than TUF 15 on Fox.
(Video courtesy of MTV)
In an attempt to appeal to a wider breadth of demographic than The Ultimate Fighter, MTV has created a new reality show that is loosely based around the MMA aspirations of a group of small town Louisiana kids.
The show is basically 16 and Pregnant and the “babies” they are expecting are their upcoming fights. Truth be told, the concept is a good one since it’s more “reality” TV than TUF has become and most of us will likely be able to convince our spouses and girlfriends to watch a show like this one strictly for the train wreck factor. The fact that it will air immediately after Jersey Shore on Mondays and prior to the JS rebroadcast will mean big numbers for the show — maybe even more than TUF 15 on Fox.
The demos the show will undoubtedly resonate with include:
In our reality, they would put all of the upcoming opponents from a scheduled card in the same fighter house, which we know would never happen, but we can still dream, right?
Well, according to a report by SI’s Loretta Hunt we were half right.
(Sources say the new show will have 75% less bodily fluid ingestion in each season.)
In our reality, they would put all of the upcoming opponents from a scheduled card in the same fighter house, which we know would never happen, but we can still dream, right?
Well, according to a report by SI’s Loretta Hunt we were half right.
SPIKE president Kevin Kay — TV executive responsible for bringing TUF from its original conception to reality, is planning a new MMA reality show that could go head to head with Fox’s incarnation of TUF starting in 2013.
Kay insists that the new show won’t be a carbon copy of the old one.
“One thing we won’t do is duplicate The Ultimate Fighter. It’s a great franchise and it’s going to go on to another network. I actually think the tournament format is a little bit like The Ultimate Fighter without the reality piece of it, per se, because every fighter is fighting three times over the course of the tournament to win the championship. You fight, you lose, you go home. There’s a lot of reality already baked into that idea. There’s different kinds of reality ideas that were starting to kick around — nothing we have our hearts set on yet — but we’re hearing lots of good ideas for reality programming around Bellator. But it won’t be 16 guys in a house. We’re not doing that show over again.”
He also touched on the technicality that will keep Bellator programming off of his channel for the next year and two months.
“While we own [The UFC fight] library, we can’t put another mixed martial arts promotion on Spike proper, on the linear network [until the agreement is up]. They could buy it back if they chose to. They chose not to do that. We have the library and we’ll use the library. I don’t have an opinion about [whether or not they decided not to buy the library back to block us from airing another promotion’s fights for a year after our deal with them expires]. I think that’s their decision. We have the library and we’re using it because we’re paying for it and why wouldn’t we? Whatever their motives are for not wanting to take it back and put it somewhere else, you’d have to ask them.”
A true optimist if ever there was one, Kay is looking at the extended period between live MMA broadcasts on SPIKE as a positive thing.
“One of the great things about having this much time to prepare and having Bellator on MTV2 throughout next year, is we have the next 14-15 months to hear a lot of pitches, pick what we want to do, put things in production, (including) a lot of reality programming around Bellator, some shoulder programming. We’re going to take Bellator’s library of fights, see what’s there and see how we can package that because, for the fans, they’ve not seen most of these Bellator fighters before so we want to build those stars. And it’s actually fresh library product, so there’s lots we can do and we have 15 months to figure it out.”
(VidProps: YouTube/DragonMan34)
It takes a special kind of man to look at his own family – two daughters, son and wife/mother/diva – and think, “You know what would be good for us? Reality television.” Obviously, that kind of …
It takes a special kind of man to look at his own family – two daughters, son and wife/mother/diva – and think, “You know what would be good for us? Reality television.” Obviously, that kind of man is Antonio McKee. We all know McKee never saw a camera he wasn’t dying to hog and now that he’s finally about to make his UFC debut against Jacob Volkmann in January, we can only assume he thought it was a no-brainer to self-produce the above reality show “pilot” and release it to the Internets. That displays a brand of foresight, ingenuity and business savvy that few fighters have. It also shows a kind of shocking self-importance, even for a dude who could never be accused of modesty or discretion or even being able to tell a good idea from a bad one.
Then you watch nine-plus minutes of “The McKee’s Untamed” and you have admit: Damn, maybe he’s right. The McKee family is certainly just as entertaining as, say, the Osbournes or Kardashians or whichever bewigged aging rockstar VH-1 manages to dig up next. Actually, it doesn’t even take nine minutes. As soon as you hit the family introductions and see the low-budget glam shots of mother/wife/diva Jen (particularly the one of her holding that dagger … classy …) you’re hooked. By the time you get a load of Kenny, Antonio’s tatted-up “assistant/man nanny” it’s clear that what we have here is a crew of people with the wherewithal to shoot and edit a video of themselves, but absolutely no concept of whether or not they should shoot and edit a video of themselves. Next stop: Comedy gold.
