By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, June 26, 2008

Turns out what people really crave this summer is not another competition series featuring three snarky judges or a brushed-off '60s-'70s format -- it's a competition series in which people risk bodily harm so we can point at them and laugh. Who knew?

Tuesday's unveiling of ABC's reality series "Wipeout" became the highest-rated debut of the summer among the younger viewers advertisers covet, and ABC's best summer-series premiere in three years.

About 10 million viewers watched 24 contestants -- go-go dancer, pastor, cop, chick who hates her ex-boyfriend, really tall guy, jazz dancer, candy salesman, etc. -- attempt to run a series of loopy, incredibly difficult obstacle courses that included things called Topple Tower, Sucker Punch and, of course, the Giant Balls, for a measly $50,000 prize.

All the while, two guys named John (Henson of "Talk Soup" fame and Anderson from "SportsCenter") provided commentary and guy-banter and, yes, they had a field day with the Giant Balls: "She's on the rebound and already ricocheting off big balls!" "Mama never told me there'd be balls like this!" Bada-dum!

"It never gets old!" chortled the traditional sports broadcast chick-on-the-field, in this case Jill Wagner, from the sidelines as one more contestant bounced off the Giant Balls into a pool of mud.

That 10 million is virtually identical to the 10 million viewers who checked out the very first broadcast of ABC's Regis Philbin-hosted "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" series way back in the summer of '99. That was the show that spawned a thousand rip-offs and mutations, now luring us like the Sirens to the mental shipwreck that was Tuesday's prime time -- the Mother of All Reality TV Nights.

About 9 million of those who managed to resist the obvious charms of "Wipeout" got drawn in by NBC's debut of "Celebrity Family Feud" in the same time slot Tuesday night. Still another 3.3 million were ensnared by Fox's "Hell's Kitchen" rerun; and CW's "Beauty and the Geek" repeat picked off the scraps -- all 870,000 of them.

In all, 23 million people went mentally missing Tuesday at 8.

Things got even worse at 9. ABC followed "Wipeout" with the premiere of "I Survived a Japanese Game Show," in which American contestants are whisked off to Tokyo and thrust into a traditional Japanese humiliation-style game show. This week they were forced to eat food off a plate attached to the head of another contestant who was madly running on a fast-moving treadmill, after which they got spun dizzy in cribs while wearing baby bonnets and diapers, etc. That show trapped 8 million viewers, ABC's biggest non-sports summer number in the hour since '03.

"I Survived a Japanese Game Show" actually took a chunk out of an original episode of Fox's traditional humiliation-style reality series "Hell's Kitchen," which tempted just 7.8 million viewers, its lowest number since last July. And after Fox had so tenderly nurtured it in the post-"American Idol" time slot all spring!

Another 11.7 million viewers were trapped by NBC's "America's Got Talent." All told, nearly 28 million people could not resist the reality-series pull at 9 p.m. Tuesday.