“Our marching orders were to make it bigger, bolder, edgier,” Kunitz says of the show, which returns April 1. “Bigger and bolder, that’s easy. That’s the design of the course, which had to be more competitive and more athletic. And edgier, that really is about our hosts.”
“I was looking for big, broad formats and I wanted a legacy franchise that I could bring back,” Henson says of the show, which went off the air in 2014. “Creatively, we felt we felt like there was a way to update the format.” Providing those laughs are WWE star and actor Cena and “Nailed It” host and comedian Byer, who manages to toss in plenty of blue gags while still keeping it family-friendly. “It took us a while to dial in how far we could take it,” says Henson. “But John Cena plays an amazing straight man to her sort of bad girl, and she does it all with such an innocence in her delivery.”
Also new to the mix is sideline reporter Camille Kostek. Yet much of the production team remains the same, led by Kunitz, who is currently based at Lionsgate under an overall deal — but had negotiated the ability to still do “Wipeout” should it be brought back. “I would say it’s the most important show of my career,” he says. “It would be heartbreaking if I wasn’t able to come back and produce the show again.
“What we really had going for us is that we’re 100% outdoors,” Kunitz says. “When you watch the show, you will have no idea that it was ever shot in COVID. Contestants are running side by side, jumping on top of each other. We don’t have that sort of awkward distance between people, and we were able to do that because of the intense COVID protocol system that we had set up.
horrible in every respect. i’ll stick to reruns