All Stars’ Showrunner Peels Back Curtain on New Season
When MTV put The Challenge on their airwaves back in 1998, the idea was to assemble a group of former Real World and Road Rules cast members and pit them against each other for a cash prize. Nobody could have predicted the show would be going strong over a quarter century later with more than 500 episodes across 39 seasons, spinoffs shooting all over the globe, and a rabid fan base that obsesses over every detail of it on social media, web forums, podcasts, and even live Challenge Mania events where fans gather together to meet cast members.
Along the way, many competitors dropped away from the flagship show since they could no longer devote months of their year to a reality show that films almost exclusively overseas, or were simply replaced by fresh faces. But in 2021, after years of pressure from Challenge Godfather Mark Long, The Challenge: All Stars premiered on Paramount Plus. It brought back fan favorites from the early days for a truncated version of the show. Many of them moved on from reality television well over a decade ago and never thought they’d wear another Challenge jersey.
For the fourth season of The Challenge: All Stars, which premiers April 10 after a long delay, producers dug deep into Challenge history. Road Rules: Down Under cast member Kefla Hare hasn’t been on the show since 1999. And fan favorite Flora Alekseyeva from Real World: Miami has been MIA since 2002. “I’m 51, but you can’t put that on camera,” Alekseyeva says early in the first episode. “I actually really hope I don’t die in this Challenge.”
They’ll be joined by Challenge legend Cara Maria Sorbello, who has been away from the show since 2019, Leroy Garrett and fiancé “Killer” Kam Williams, Tony “Tony Time” Raines, Laurel Stucky, Brad Fiorenza, Averey Tressler, Ayanna Mackins, Veronica Portillo, and other greats from Challenge days of yore. Shortly before the premiere, Rolling Stone hopped on Zoom with Challenge showrunner and executive producer Ryan Smith to chat all about it.
When did you enter the Challenge universe?
I entered in 2005 for Season 10, The Inferno 2.
Speaking broadly, what are the biggest changes you’ve seen to the show since that time?
The show was originally super fun and goofy. We always had a layer of people wearing chicken suits and doing fun stuff. And then from 10 on, it became more aggressive, let’s just say. It became something that the cast needed to train for to be a part of. It got way more extreme. Budgets got higher, stunts got much larger, and then the show just became this powerhouse. It feels like it’s an adventure movie show these days.
I think the special sauce of the show is that you keep bringing back the same players. Most reality competition shows bring in brand-new people every season. You’ve had people that have been part of the world for over 20 years.
For sure. Having cast members return leads to better storylines throughout. It becomes an actual TV show or a soap opera, in a sense. There are storylines that have run for years. But what also ends up happening is the cast knows how to play the games. Sometimes, you get a bunch of new people, and you see them get weeded out so fast because all the veterans are like, “You know what? You don’t need to get so hot so fast.” And that’s just the evolution of a veteran. They know how to play the game because they have been doing it for so long.
As the show went on, casting must have become increasingly difficult. You have older fans who love the OG players, younger fans who like the new ones, and fans of other shows who watch because you’ve brought their favorites into the game. Pleasing all those types of fans at once couldn’t be easy.
Yeah. Once we started getting into people from Big Brother and other countries, we were gaining a bigger audience. But you’re right. There were some older fans like, “I don’t even know who these new people are. I don’t even know if I care about them.” But they eventually fall in love with them. And they’ve done a great job with casting by always keeping someone that’s kind from the older generation and then introducing some new people. Both fans come together, and then, eventually, they all fall in love with each other anyway.
I think of someone like Kyle Christie from Geordie Shore in England. Almost nobody in America had ever heard of him, and he became this beloved Challenge player almost overnight.
He’s the best. The minute he walked on set, even for the crew, he was such a nice guy and so funny. What a great guy that is.
What role did Mark Long play in the creation of All Stars? It’s an idea that has definitely been percolating in the fan community for a long time.
Inside the production house we’ve always talked about it. It’s always been kind of a thing. Mark Long, from what I know about it, keeps in touch with all these people. These guys all do their own things at bars and get gigs around the country. I think he collected enough players. They were like like, “Yeah, if we do this, I’ll do it.”
He brought that to the producers and was like, “I have a handful of cast members here ready to do this. Are you guys ready to pull the trigger?” That’s how Bunim/Murray [Productions] and MTV were like, “Let’s do it. Are these people ready to go?” I was not there in the negotiations of how it went down, but that’s how my understanding of it went.
It makes sense. It’s like the seniors tour in the world of golf. These people are all still around. They should be playing.
Yeah, for sure. I grew up in the Nineties, and I graduated high school in ’98. So for me, All Stars was all the ones that I really watched. That’s when Real World, for me, was at its hottest. I was like, “I love all these people.” So All Stars was just living all my kid dreams again. These are the people I watched.
We have some big names this season that we haven’t seen in a very long time, like Kefla and Flora. I knew their names when I signed onto the project, but when I saw their faces pop up, I was like, “Oh, my God. I totally know those people.” It got me really excited.
What lessons did you learn from the first few seasons of All Stars?
When the first All Stars happened, it felt like its identity wasn’t there. We were using older cast people we hadn’t seen in a while, but the games and the level of play were very similar to the flagship. It came off as like, “Oh my gosh, we’re putting some of these 40-year-olds in games that are probably meant for some 25-year-olds.” A 40-some-year-old falling from 30 feet and hitting the water, that lasts a little bit longer than a 24-year-old falling and hitting the water.
On All Stars 4, we wanted to go back to the original idea of the show. “Let’s have a bunch of fun. If we want to get them to come on the show, we can’t kill them and try to treat them like 24-year-olds winning a million dollars.” We want to see the older people who have been around, but we can’t beat them up to the point where they can’t even compete. A knee injury at 40 ruins you forever.
How long does a season of All Stars film in comparison to a standard season of the flagship?
With the flagship, they are out there for eight or nine weeks. And there’s the four weeks of prep where you’re there doing setup. And then with All Stars, I think we finished it off in about four weeks.
Talk about casting. There isn’t any sort of age limit. You had Kailah Casillas-Bird on a season before she was even 30. How do you know when someone is an All Star?
Yeah, there’s definitely sometimes where it’s like we need to fill a spot. It’s a fine line, but try to give a definition. For this season, we were trying to get some of the past people you haven’t seen for a while. We’ve all seen Bananas. We’ve all seen CT. That’s all happening already all the time. But who are the people we haven’t seen? So what we tried to do is fill this cast with as many names you haven’t seen in a hot minute, or 20 years in some cases. But some names like Cara … I hadn’t seen her for a minute. She’s a veteran now, even if she doesn’t feel like the Veronicas or the Tinas.
I’m sure some people in their 40s or 50s can’t compete for nine weeks for the flagship, but can make time for All Stars.
That’s always the thing, getting people to do it. You’re asking people often to quit their job to come out and play with us. And I think when you’re on the flagship, you’re like, “If I’m going to be there that whole time and make it to the end, I’m going to have to be in shape, ready to play.” You can’t just on a whim go out and do the flagship show. But for All Stars, we worked with the knowledge that a lot of them have kids and families and lives, and they can’t just break away for two and a half months.
It must have been a trip for someone like Kefla, who hasn’t been since the Nineties.
What he had to come in prepped for was more the social game, hanging out in a house with a bunch of people. That’s its own game in itself. He was in shape, he was built, he was there, he was a great competitor, he is strong. He could be on any season. That guy’s totally ready athletically to be on the show.
But living in a house is its own mental game. Grown adults who have kids are all of a sudden in a house with 20-some people that are in bunk beds or beds next to you that are in the same room. It’s a camp that lasts three weeks, a little bit longer than you’re probably used to.
What’s your average day like on set?
My day is 16 hours, at best. You’re usually waking up in the morning and reading through all the notes of what happened from the time you went to bed at 10 or 11 o’clock at night to what happened at six in the morning. The awesome part of All Stars 4 is a lot of them go to bed at 10 o’clock, 9 o’clock. It’s not like the flagship show where they’re up till three in the morning. They have a game the next day, so they were very chill and ready to go to bed. My favorite thing about All Stars 4 is just the adulthood of this all.
And after reading through my notes, I’m immediately getting updates from the challenge team who’s out in the location. I then race to the challenge, walk through it all one last time, get eyes on everything. And then we get in our trailer, the cast enters into the set, and we play the game.
When the game is done, I race to an elimination site to start testing the elimination that’s going to happen the next day. If we’re not doing that, we’re probably in some type of meeting, often dealing with the network to talk about the finale. The finale is always being created throughout the season just because it takes so many weeks of prep to design challenges. When the challenges are designed, you’re kind of just creating a finale with what money you have left throughout the season.
When you watch the show, it seems like only TJ is there, and everything else is just put together by magic. The army of people behind the scenes is basically invisible.
There’s a lot of us. TJ is there the whole time and very well-versed in what’s happening. But there is a team of us. We design these games. The cast has questioned us in the past about that. They’ll be like, “You made that game up because you knew I was going against this person.” And I’m like, “Man, we designed that three months ago, passed it through lawyers, passed it through insurance, art has been building it for a week. We did not know you two were going into this elimination game. It just happened to be that game.”
It must be annoying to go on Reddit and see some of those same sort of conspiracy theories. Some people think everything is rigged or scripted. I’ll read people thinking that Devin was told which dagger to pull or other nonsense like that.
It’s insane how much we work at this, and we take pride in it. A lot of us were athletes at some point, so we take pride in the honor system of the sport. And I won’t purposely ever try to screw someone out of money. And that’s illegal. It’s 100 percent illegal. If that was ever to be proven, that would be a major deal.
Sometimes, I get the two best players playing the craziest game. And you’re like, “If I were designing this by script, they would be playing Hall Brawl right now. But they’re not, they’re playing this game.” It’s just that sometimes it lands in our favor, and sometimes it doesn’t.
There does seem to be fewer headbangers than there used to be. The last time we saw a Hall Brawl, they held pillows and did a puzzle afterward.
Yeah, especially when it comes to All Stars. We’re not trying to crush anybody, hurt anybody. But it’s also been done so many times, and you have to be as safe as you possibly can. You’re also getting to the point where the risk/reward isn’t worth it. It’s like, “Man, if someone gets hurt and busts a nose or something like that, that’s fine. But if someone breaks an arm, they’ll have to leave the game. That’s not good for the show, it’s not good for anybody.” So yes, there have been headbangers, and we do them, and they’re a blast, and they’re fun, but as a producer, you’re nervous as hell that night. That’s the night where I don’t sit down. I pace around.
What do you do to make sure spoilers don’t get out there? There are fans that live to spoil The Challenge or other reality shows. That’s so crazy to me since it ruins all the fun of watching it.
Spoilers get out there. We still have no idea how that happens, but we have theories. We keep most people on set on a need-to-know basis. It’s not that you don’t trust the crew, but we just don’t know where this stuff is coming from.
Sometimes, crew members just show up to set, and they don’t even know what’s happening that day. They find out at the same time the cast finds out. There are certain twists in a game that only like seven people know about in advance. It’s like, “I don’t want you to accidentally say something to a caterer, and then the caterer will be repeating it back to one of their people, and the cast overhears it later by someone in the same catering company.”
Social media must make it tough since fans try to use that to track players in real time.
They have contracts that say they can’t post anything until a certain day. They are allowed to have people take over their accounts and run them for them, but they can’t post anything about the show until a certain day. And we chase them down and we all follow them too, so we’re all watching them on Instagram and all the socials. Our lawyers are too.
I’ve heard rumors of All Stars 5. Is that going to happen?
That’s what we’re hoping for. I think All Stars 4 is the best one, personally. It’s so good. It’s so fun, and the faces that we get to have and the challenges that we have in there are just … I think it will have to lead us to another one.
Were you proud to see Trishelle and CT win Traitors?
Super proud. I don’t really reach out to cast members that much other than for work purposes, but I hit them up. I was like, “Congratulations, good job.” It was really great to see that. House of Villains, Bananas was on. I mean, we see Bananas around town, but seeing The Traitors was awesome.
It’s so great they were on with people from Big Brother, Love Island, Survivor, Real Housewives, and these other big shows, and they just ran circles around them and won the whole damn thing.
These veterans, these people we’ve kept around for so long, have all learned how to play the game. Some of these other people don’t know how to play a strategic game of this. You can do it from your couch, but it’s different when you’re in the house, and you actually have to lie to someone’s face.
It’s amazing how The Challenge has grown in recent years. It seems bigger than ever with all these spinoffs.
It’s been blowing up these past few years. There was a point where my wife was running a show, I was running a season, and Justin Booth was running a season. We had all these hub versions in the U.K. and Australia. We were all just filming. The crew was just being dragged from one country to the next, and just bouncing around. It was almost a year and a half straight just filming The Challenge at all times. We would share gear. It was just like, “Leave your gear there, I’ll pick it up and take it and go.”
It used to be that you would do a season, and it’d just be like, “Oh, that was fun. That might be the last one.” I remember sitting in New Zealand on the edge of a cliff once and just being like, “That was a good run. I hope this show comes back.” Because you’re never promised the next season. Now it’s like, “Who’s doing the next season? Who has time? Who can go on the road right now?”
Do you think we’ll ever see another season of The Real World or Road Rules?
I personally would like to see Road Rules. I’ve heard rumors about it, but I’ve never heard it catch legs. I’m not sure with The Real World because now there’s Housewives, and there’s other shows about people living in a house. It kind of exists already. I could see The Real World being harder to bring back. But Road Rules feels like a no-brainer. Why not? That’d be super fun just going around the country.
Now, the big question: Who is the Challenge GOAT? Is it Bananas or CT?
They’re both great players. It’s hard to say they’re not the best because their track records alone are good. But I think CT is the most well-rounded. I think he catches all angles. I would probably put CT over Bananas, but Bananas is a great player. CT has a history that follows him. It helps people already afraid of him before they even see him. So he kind of has a leg up on that. But Bananas is a great player, but since the deal with Sarah on Rivals, he only won Total Madness. He’s been laying eggs for a while.
Jordan’s great, too. There are many other great people out there, but those two shine the brightest. Everyone knows their names. Anybody on the street that talks to me about the show, they’re like, “Bananas or CT?”
Many fans hope Wes will change his mind and un-retire.
I’d like to see Wes again. He’s a fun one. He’d be good. If anything, I’d like to see him on All Stars. That’s kind of why I’m hoping this All Stars angle will always be like this. It’s like, “Hey, you don’t have to be on the road for six months. You can just come here and work with us, and we’ll do a fun show, and we still get to see you still in your element.”
