Johnny Knoxville to Host ‘Fear Factor’ Reboot, Despite Bad-Mouthing the Original

Good news for the struggling “rat rectum soup” industry: Fear Factor is coming back. 

NBC’s notorious reality competition show is being rebooted as a new series dubbed Fear Factor: The Next Chapter. Unlike previous iterations of the franchise, this one will reportedly involve contestants being “dropped into an unforgiving, remote location” where they will have to “live together under one roof, and face mind-blowing stunts, harrowing challenges and a twisted game of social strategy where trust is fleeting.” 

So, in other words, the show is getting the full Squid Game treatment. 

The original series was, of course, hosted by Joe Rogan, while the short-lived MTV revival starred Ludacris. But for the newest take on the format, the producers have opted to hire a totally new host, one who isn’t busy making hundreds of millions of dollars interviewing celebrity quacks. And the person they’ve selected actually makes a lot of sense: Jackass star Johnny Knoxville.

After all, Knoxville is a “doing horrific things to your body on TV” pioneer. And more recently, Knoxville has proven that he isn’t above appearing on dumb reality shows. Although he sometimes incorporates tasers into the mix.

But Knoxville’s hiring is a little funny considering that he hasn’t always been the biggest fan of Fear Factor. Perhaps not coincidentally, the reality show premiered just one year after Jackass became a legit phenomenon. And the fact that Fear Factor simply combined the premise of Jackass with the competition element of shows like Survivor and American Idol didn’t go unnoticed at the time. 

“Fear Factor is an imitation of an MTV program, Jackass, named, perhaps, for its target viewer,” the Washington Post noted in 2001. A review in The Los Angeles Times suggested that Fear Factor “has all the idiocy of MTV’s Jackass but none of its Beavis-gets-a-reality-show charm.”

It wasn’t just Fear Factor that seemingly copied Jackass and repackaged it for a more mainstream audience, there was also the Brooke Burns-hosted game show Dog Eat Dog, which forced contestants to engage in ridiculous stunts, sometimes while answering trivia questions. 

Knoxville himself was asked about his apparent influence on these shows during a 2002 interview with Entertainment Weekly. And while he didn’t seem all that bothered, he had less than glowing things to say about Fear Factor. “Hey, NBC owes us some money!” Knoxville joked, adding, “but really, it doesn’t matter to us. What is it that crazy Irish guys say? Oh, yeah, a dog doesn’t praise its fleas.”

Well, now it looks as though Knoxville may be getting some of that NBC money after all thanks to one of those fleas.