Look, you could watch some high-minded and sophisticated new show like The Great (which, to be fair, isn’t all that high-minded or sophisticated)—or you could say “screw it,” and tune in to Fox’s new American Gladiator-meets-American Ninja Warrior competition series Ultimate Tag, premiering May 20, instead. Who couldn’t use some meathead muscle right now, a forsaking of housebound neuroses in favor of visceral, unthinking being?
If only Ultimate Tag were as agile as the gymnastics required to convince yourself to watch it. The reasoning for the show’s existence is sound enough. Though American Ninja Warrior—a clever co-opting of a Japanese format highlighting the French athletic disciplines of Parkour and freerunning—is very popular, it lacks a certain American sporting spirit; that is to say, it has no human-on-human physical conflict. Sure, beating an obstacle course is cool—but what if an acrobatic, trash-talking menace were there as well, chasing down the person running the course? Certainly that would be cooler.
That description makes Ultimate Tag sound more exciting than it really is, though. For this show, Ninja Warrior’s obstacle courses have been flattened into mere lazy obstructions, low platforms to hop over or tunnels to crawl through as a “professional tagger” comes loping after contestants to rip flags off their vests. There’s certainly some limber grace to be found in these professionals; many of them leap and dart with remarkably fluid ease. But Ultimate Tag never achieves Ninja Warrior’s beguiling momentum. The game is too easy and over too quickly; contestants and taggers alike are too often thwarted by walls, by the limited constraints of the show.
The competition tries to juice things up in synthetic ways, mostly by turning the professional taggers into American Gladiator-esque characters, melding goofy nostalgia with our current obsession with superhero taxonomy. Yet they all end up sounding more like the saddos from the Twirl King Yo-Yo Company than anything heroic or fearsome. The taggers I’ve encountered thus far include The Flow, Geek, The Kid, Flame, Beach Boy, Iron Giantess, The Boss, La Flair, Atomic Ant, Bulldog, Caveman, Banshee, Big Deal, Spitfire, and, finally, Horse. Just, Horse. If there were any sense of irony, any winking camp, at play here, these names would be endearing. But they seem mostly serious, a grim fact which fills in a large portion of the depressing portrait Ultimate Tag draws of its ideal imagined viewer.
Geek has wild curly hair and talks about math in a nerdy voice when being interviewed by the hosts (football brothers J.J., Derek, and T.J. Watt), but he’s obviously just a hunk in glasses. Beach Boy’s Real Housewives-ian tagline is, “You’ll be getting my good vibrations, baby . . . When I scrape you off the floor!” Banshee is advertised as the wild one—“the terrifying crazy of Banshee” is the intro she gets—but mostly she just has funky makeup and dyed hair. (Her characterization also brings to mind Scary Spice of the Spice Girls, in that both are black women made to be frightening and animalistic for no discernible reason beyond the most terrible one.)
Audience members in the stands hold signs supporting various taggers, urging viewers to fear the Banshee and the like. But of course, this is a brand new show, so all this loyalty is entirely invented. “This is a dream come true,” one contestant says after winning a challenge, suggesting that he took a nap and had a dream during a commercial break. How else would his unconscious have known to dream about Ultimate Tag?