Tiger King is everywhere. Seemingly everyone has watched the Netflix true crime docuseries, officially titled Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, while they’re cooped up inside and practicing social distancing or self-quarantining — or sheltering in place, depending on varying statewide orders — during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Well, Georgia football coach Kirby Smart was among the many people looking for an entertaining show, but he’s decidedly not a fan of Tiger King, which is famously outrageous, compelling and appalling and centered around a guy named Joe Exotic.
Smart said during a media conference call Tuesday that he started the seven-episode documentary, but he just couldn’t make it through the first two. As he explained:
“I was like dying for shows to watch while I was doing self-quarantine, and I got through two episodes, I just couldn’t do it, man. I couldn’t stomach it. And everybody continues to talk about it, but my patience wears thin. I’m looking for a little more plot, a little more — I don’t know what the right word is. But that’s not my cup of tea. I’ll just say that. I’m more of “Ozark” guy.”
Smart said he prefers another Netflix show, which recently released its third season. And that’s fair because Tiger King isn’t for everyone — even if everyone can’t stop talking about it.
Every year come April Fool’s Day, some brand and/or practical joker with limited imagination thinks it’ll be fun to pull an April Fool’s joke.
First off: April Fool’s jokes aren’t jokes. There is never a set up nor a payoff. They usually involve lying to people, and then making them feel stupid.
They are not jokes, they are lies.
Which means they usually suck.
And on this year, of all years: Do not do them.
I know there’s some marketing exec out there right now who thinks of himself as a sort of caustic wit, and loves to “chop it up” or “bust balls” or whatever, who will make the argument that this is the perfect time to pull an April Fool’s joke for his brand.
It is not. It is the worst possible time. We are living in the second chapter of a post-apocalyptic novel right now. As a society we are collectively stressed, anxious, having weird nightmares, locked in our homes with an invisible enemy out there making our loved ones sick, or worse. That’s the healthy of us. Those suffering, well, their pain is significantly worse.
We don’t need pranks right now. If ever there were a time NOT for pranks, this is it.
Brands: I don’t care that you hired an ad firm that ideated a great prank or whatever. Call it off.
People: Don’t be idiots. Now is not the time. We can go back to your dumb lie-pranks next year, but for today, please, for all of us: Just don’t.
The 10th season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm ended a few weeks ago, which stinks because it was a great season of watching Larry David doing Larry David things and right now we need all the entertainment and laughs that we can get.
Because things are pretty darn rough right now.
Thankfully the great Larry David is here to entertain us some more while also delivering an important message to people in California about staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic.
As you might have guessed, Larry is all for staying home and he has a message for those who feel or do differently:
“You’re hurting old people like me. Well, not me… I’ll never see you.”
Like everyone else, Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio is back home as the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing continues.
In fact, between his constant appearances on The Challenge and his hosting duties for 1st Look, it’s the longest he’s been home uninterrupted in quite some time.
Although he’s not thinking about retirement from the show he’s won a record six times, he did have this to say in a conversation with For The Win ahead of Wednesday’s premiere of Total Madness on MTV: “I kind of needed this break a little bit, and I know that’s not necessarily true for everybody. But I will say after this last season of The Challenge, a break was definitely needed.”
“Every season that goes by, a little piece of me dies,” he added, “and I know I’ve only got so many of these in the tank, and I will say after this last season, I felt every day of 37 years old.”
But the hunger for that elusive seventh title hasn’t gone away. It’s just that he has to train twice as hard and in smarter ways to compete with younger castmates. And of course since The Challenge is sport, he compared himself to a veteran pitcher.
“When they lose their fastball, they have to get crafty and they have to locate their pitches better and more filthy. They have to change up their game to coincide with what their body allows them to do.”
Here’s more of our Q&A with Bananas:
How did the new rule about needing to win an elimination to make a final change the game, and how did it change for you specifically?
It didn’t change it at all for me. If anything, it leveled the playing field. I’ve been saying for a while, there are certain players — I won’t throw anyone under the bus here, but everybody who watches knows — who go in and based solely on their intimidating political game or physical game, they’ll never be voted in. They can play the middle of the field and just be wishy-washy and make it to a final. Then there are the people who have to work, i.e. me. Out of 20 seasons I’ve been on, there have been two or three where I haven’t gone in. So I know every season, I’m going to go in, maybe multiple times. It made people who get a free ride earn it. I think it’s a great twist and it really reset and reshuffle the deck from last season when you had 12 or 13 people in a final and only four had seen elimination.
MTV
Did it change the strategy for others? I imagine you have to think about whether you want to go in now or later.
Completely. Every season you do, you have to change your strategy. The one common theme, however, is stay out elimination. That’s your goal. This season, it’s like having to retrain a dog to not be aggressive. (You think) “Well, wait a minute, now I have to go in.” So what you see is instead of people fighting not to go in, is people fighting to go in.
Like you said, people were fighting early on, and then I thought, what if there’s a twist and there’s a purge or you have to go in again? Everyone had this premonition at different times about when to go in. There were so many more twists to elimination than there have ever been. … Every season coming in, I’m always wondering what they’re going to do different. They made us fight for oxygen this season because we lived in a bunker. So they had to check the oxygen levels every day to make sure it was 21 percent oxygen or we would suffocate.
I saw that! You were living in a place without windows! And was there no swimming pool as usual?
We had an above-ground pool in a silo that was probably 40 degrees at its warmest.
Can I get a quick scouting report on the rookies?
In my opinion, it was a pretty good rookie class. Fessy is a Division I college football player, guy’s an absolute monster. You have a guy from Survivor and Big Brother, Kaycee won Big Brother. So you had this new group of rookies. There’s a large Big Brother contingency — Fessy, Swaggy, Bayleigh, Kaycee — that all knew each other. Not only do you have people who play an intense mind game, but they know each other. It was an alliance that was ready-made. It was a dominant rookie class. They didn’t make things easy for us.
In a bid to do his part to help entertain the masses while we’re all in coronavirus lockdown, Joe Buck stepped up and offered to do play-by-play analysis of everyday moments for fans who sent him videos on social media.
“Yeah, I’ve had a couple of submissions from let’s say, a man and a woman, that just didn’t seem appropriate to put my voice to in this stage of my life, Buck told KMOX Radio in St. Louis. “Maybe later in life, but not now. I look at these videos very carefully and pick the ones that seem the most wholesome to put my voice to.”
I’m not sure why this needs to be said, but it does. If you’re enjoying quarantine time with a significant other and decide to add a little variety to your daily routine, please don’t send those videos to Joe Buck. In addition to just calling the videos, Buck is also asking people to donate money to local charities if he calls your video. That’s a very good thing! Don’t ruin it!
We don’t have a lot going for us right now, and Buck’s videos are one of the few bright spots in our coronavirus filled news cycle. Don’t spoil it for everyone else. Keep your videos to yourself, or, you know, post them on Pornhub if that’s your vibe. Just keep them away from Joe Buck.
He still won the game, but he missed this clue in spectacular fashion.
Jeopardy! is challenging, and anyone who’s ever watched it knows that. But sometimes, when contestants get a clue wrong, they fail so spectacularly that viewers just have to be amazed. And sometimes they get roasted by the internet too.
That’s what happened on the episode of Jeopardy! that aired on Monday night. With $15,400, Kyle had a sizable lead over Monya ($6,800) and Khalilah ($4,200) going into Final Jeopardy.
And luckily for him, he decided not to wager any money on the final category, which was “Advertising Characters,” because, while he absolutely had the right idea, he swung and missed big time.
And, although he still won the game, people on Twitter had a little too much fun with his Final Jeopardy response and roasted him for it.
I’m sorry, I know this is not important but the response “Ruff McGruffin” when he meant McGruff the Crime Dog has hit me hard. #Jeopardypic.twitter.com/ei0jJIBYAJ
someone on jeopardy thought macgruff the crime dog's name was ruff mcgruffin and i am inconsolable right now 😂
— moms mabley fan account (@queeneulalia) March 30, 2020
When you are in quarantine, the stupidest things make you laugh. His face 😂 Ruff McGruffin: Take a chomp out of doing illegal actives. https://t.co/jLU71v7Gir
Today’s Final Jeopardy implies McGruff is responsible for the drop in the murder rate. Also, the winner guessed “Ruff McGruffin” pic.twitter.com/Z0kxuP7k58
Ruff McGruffin! Another contestant answered Scooby Doo. 😂 Love both attempts more than the right one. #CrimeDog tag team. Final #Jeopardy: Jack Keil’s team created this animal character rolled out in 1980, the year of the USA’s highest recorded murder rate. https://t.co/SKaGTEQmDF
March 2020, the single longest month in the history of the world, will come to an end tomorrow. At least I really hope it will come to an end tomorrow. I’m not going to believe it until I see the calendar and see April 1, and not like, March 32, or the black, dead eyes of Satan himself laughing at me, I won’t believe it.
Do you remember the tornadoes that hit Nashville? It was terrible, a lot of people had homes damaged. Lives were lost.
That was March. That was this same month. If you had asked me that this morning, I would have told you that happened in January, or possibly back in 2019. No, it happened on March 2. That was this month.
What about in the political realm? How about Super Tuesday, when Joe Biden was buoyed by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out of the race, and ran out to a big delegate lead over Bernie Sanders?
That was March. That happened this month. Technically, Pete Buttigieg was still running for president in March. He dropped out on the first, but for a day that occurred THIS MONTH, Buttigieg was still in the presidential field.
I barely remember what Mayor Pete looks like. He looked like Celtics coach Brad Stevens, right?
Mayor Pete? Celtics coach Brad Stevens? Who’s to say.
A global pandemic started causing thousands of people to die. Cities, entire countries, were shut down. All the major professional sports leagues were canceled or postponed, an unprecedented number of people filed for unemployment, our economy tanked, and we all ran out of toilet paper. That’s happened in the last, like, two and a half weeks.
Anyway, tomorrow, it’s over. March will end. April will start. The month T.S. Eliot famously called “the cruelest.” I don’t see how it could possibly be crueler.
Jack Black is arguably the most gifted physical comedian of our time. I can’t tell you the amount of times the man has made me laugh in a film just by running, as he takes a simple act and has a way of throwing in flourishes — a small skip, the tiniest leap — that make the entire thing work in a new, ridiculously funny way.
He also has that rare agility you occasionally see in bigger fellas (Chris Farley had it), which allows him to switch between bumbling doofus and graceful ballerina and back again, all in a moment or two.
All of which is to say that I shouldn’t have been surprised that Black would be absolutely essential on TikTok. Yet here I was, surprised. Now you can enjoy it. Watch, and be amazed:
In a minute, Black shows off every part of his arsenal. The agility, the goofiness, the faux-klutziness, and then a show-stopper move that someone of his size shouldn’t be able to pull off.
Thank you for this, Jack Black. I stand and applaud.
Your guide to a sport that’s actually coming back this week.
Sports fans: if you haven’t become a die-hard of the long-running MTV reality competition series The Challenge, now is the time to do it.
For years, I’ve been covering the show like a sport, because it should be counted as one. Each week here at For The Win, we do power rankings of the players/pairs/teams involved. And with a new round coming this Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET — this one’s called The Challenge: Total Madness — I figured it’s a good time to prepare non-Challenge fans in need of some sports content to watch.
Here’s your sports fan guide to the show:
What is The Challenge?
Over two decades ago, MTV took some personalities from The Real World and Road Rules and put them into teams that competed against each other. From there, the series grew into its own, standalone competition show, with rookies who would come in — later, from other reality shows — and attempt to win money.
Oh, yes, I forgot. Winners of every season win money! That’s the goal! These days, it’s a million dollars at stake, whether it’s for the individual winner, duo or team.
What’s the format?
It changes season to season. It could be one team versus another team of competitors. It could be pairs. And — in the case of Total Madness — it’s every Challenge contestant for his- and herself.
Each week, the competitors are given a game to play. The winners of that challenge usually benefit in some way heading into a form of elimination vote, which sometimes involves the losing team or player.
Players are eventually sent into an elimination and the loser of that head-to-head matchup goes home.
And this is a sport?
IT IS! Just look at this elimination bout from last season’s War of the Worlds 2
You’d better believe that’s sports. And the finals are always brutal:
It’s not just the physical stuff, whether it’s swinging, pulling, pushing, running, throwing, etc etc. It’s also a mental and social game — who do you align with to help you get through? How do you get through the minefield of politics that people play? Definitely sports!!!
Who are the people who participate in the show?
They’re a variety of personalities — some return season to season while others take time off before returning — who have first appeared on shows including The Real World, Are You the One?, American Ninja Warrior, Big Brother and Geordie Shore. The most famous of them all is Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio, who is set to appear in his 20th season and has won six Challenge titles. He’s been able to combine the physical prowess, mental chess and political power necessary to navigate through and win, although in recent years, the tables have turned with younger players targeting him knowing he’s the GOAT.
There are other legends playing this season including CT Tamburello, who once did this to Johnny:
Yeah, seriously.
There are, of course, little storylines about their relationships that I would need about an hour to fill you in on. There are people who have dated and broken up, competitors who have gotten married, those who have been double-crossed, and so on.
And it’s all hosted by BMX rider TJ Lavin, who gives competitors their instructions for their challenges and shames anyone who quits, among his many duties.
What’s the deal with this season?
It’s an “everyone plays as individuals” season, and here are the first five minutes of Wednesday’s premiere:
The MADDEST season of Challenge we’ve ever had is about to start! 💥 Watch the first five minutes of premiere right NOW!
“Sometimes, I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”
Well said, Michael Scott. That’s the perfect way to introduce For The Win’s tribute to The Office, the NBC comedy that celebrates the 15th anniversary of its premiere this week (March 24). For the show that’s still so embedded in American and internet culture, we’ll break down everything from the best sports moments to the best couples. Because, as Wayne Gretzky Michael Scott says, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”
When we made a list of couples from The Office, we quickly realized how ridiculously incestuous that workplace is (although it’s pretty standard for long-running sitcoms). The list ranged from obvious contenders for the show’s best to ones we totally forgot about and are, therefore, pretty insignificant.
So we narrowed it down to the top-10 couples. This isn’t about the best or healthiest relationships or which ones are #RelationshipGoals. These are our favorite couples to watch, from the heartwarming to the totally dysfunctional and everything in between.
10. Oscar and The Senator
Oscar’s affair with Angela’s husband, the senator, adds some needed depth to his character. But it also, weirdly and unexpectedly, brings Oscar closer to Angela when they realize they’re both in a relationship with (and political props for) a terrible person who’s using them. But throughout, you know this relationship is going to end in catastrophe eventually, and catastrophic couples are fun to watch. So you couldn’t help but want to know what would happen here. And while both Oscar and Angela get hurt, they also become actual friends because of it, which is kind of sweet. — Michelle Martinelli
9. Jim and Karen
Jim and Karen were a good, not great, match. With solid chemistry, they had fun and seemed similarly ambitious about their futures. But Jim was never fully invested in Karen because he was still in love with Pam, and you knew that relationship was never going to work out. Jim and Pam were the primary will-they-or-won’t-they relationship in the beginning, and Karen just served as obstacle in that storyline that you weren’t really invested in. — MM
8. Andy and Angela
Look at it this way: we needed Andy and Angela to “date” while she had an illicit affair with Dwight (which packed so much comedic punch), who she would end up marrying. There’s value in that! There’s also value in “The Duel,” in which Dwight and Andy fight for her affections. — Charles Curtis
7. Darryl and Kelly
What a hilarious, twisted mess. Kelly is initially only with Darryl — and flaunts it to a ridiculous extent — to make Ryan jealous, so you might normally feel bad for him. But his total indifference to Kelly is comical, especially when she cranks up the intensity any time Ryan is around. And when she breaks up with Darryl for Ryan, his response is perfect: “It’s cool.” — MM
Note that we had to use Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration’s full name.
Anyway! Their love is pure and simple, with ZERO drama, and their wedding was so good although even if it borrowed liberally from what was supposed to be the nuptials between Pam and Roy. — CC
Michael got his heart broken multiple times, and suffered through Jan, but eventually found his soulmate. Holly is Michael’s perfect match in every way, and although their exceptionally dorky personalities can lead to some cringeworthy moments, it’s endearing to know that Michael ends up with his perfect match, which is eventually confirmed years later in the series finale. You’ve gotta love these two together. — MM
4. Michael and Jan
Okay, look. It was a disaster of a relationship, an absolute trainwreck. BUT! It was fascinating to watch Jan convince herself that it was something she wanted, amazing to see Michael as a romantic figure … and then you got to watch it crash and burn spectacularly. On top of that, it gave Michael a chance to see that Jan wasn’t right for him. — CC
3. Jim and Pam
So, here’s the thing about Jim and Pam. The will-they-or-won’t-they arc is fantastic, and Jim finally asking Pam out while she’s talking to the camera is one of the most perfectly crafted scenes. They’re funny and goofy and make a great team while pranking Dwight. But once they get together and have a baby, they become kind of bland and just sort of exist as a couple on the show. An easy fix to that would have been significant marriage problems earlier than the final season. They’re still great, but they’re not the best. — MM
Jim and Pam are in the pantheon of all-time sitcom couples. I want them SO BADLY to be higher up, because even in those “bland” years — as Michelle put it above — we saw them struggle in a very real way. It wasn’t just sunshine and rainbows for the couple that got engaged in the rain. But I get it. There are probably better couples. Sigh. — CC
2. Kelly and Ryan
Kelly and Ryan are an absolute disaster from the beginning — when Ryan instantly regrets hooking up with her on February 13 — to the very end when Ryan abandons his baby and Kelly leaves her husband so they can run off together. And their relationship creates some of the best scenes, one-liners and, subsequently, GIFs. They’re horrible, selfish, shallow and hilarious characters who are perfect for each other, creating a toxic, dumpster fire of a relationship we can’t get enough of. And, most importantly, they deserve each other and got an ending fit for two poisonous people, and I love them for it. — MM
1. Dwight and Angela
Their roller coaster was the wildest of them all. They kept their early relationship a secret. They had a breakup after Dwight killed her cat. They had an affair in the warehouse while Angela is dating Andy. They end up having a baby together before she marries a state senator. And the series ends not with any of the other couples getting married, but these two, when we could finally see them truly expressing their feelings about each other in public, with no walls between them.
Read that whole thing over and tell me that’s not a romantic comedy you’d watch over and over. That’s why they’re No. 1 — CC
