If Thrasher Magazine's Hall of Meat were videotaped incidents instead of stationary pictures of the aftermath, they'd be... well, they'd be viral video on the Internet, which is where Mtv seems to get much of it's material for the latest in morbid entertainment (and probably a good lesson in ways of taking care of yourself when on a board, bike or skate).
The show is fairly standard MTV material - it starts out with a pretty stern disclaimer followed by the "extreme" montage opening credits, full of nasty falls and hook scream-core. Jacoby Shaddix (of Papa Roach) is your typical loud, animated all-American host in stereotypical garb and body decoration (including eye makeup!) and serves up plenty of fodder for the numerous spoofs on the show that now circulate the Internet. He tends to be the more annoying element of the show, but if you have the stomach (or are prepared to get desensitized) for a lot of the cringe-worthy snap, crackling and popping of body parts upon impact many a young athlete (if you formally define all of these activities as sports) face at some point, it can be entertaining.
It's MTV playing the cheap in order to add another show to its list of music-less fare, and entertaining as it may be, the twenty or so episodes (as of this writing) add very little variation.The setup is usually the same - five people are selected each week to recreate their harrowing events of utter pain, usually something that comes after telling how long they've been doing that sport, what they were doing that day, and then the mess that followed the third or fourth decent attempt of a trick. It's usually followed by pictures of emergency-room side shredded faces or X-rays of hardware in bones followed by at least 10 replays of the fall.
It's better taken in moderation, and not just because some of those disgusting body kinks caught on tape are sometimes too horrific to watch on the first try.
