American Ninja Warrior

I'm continually disappointed with each season as they get worse and worse. I watched the new season 12 and in the first 25 mins they have shown 5 competitors with a course time of about 1.5 minutes and a back story of about 3 minutes and the rest is replays, coming up ahead, and the announcers talking it up. It's amazing how they can have a good thing and totally ruin it with over the top sob stories, fake drama, autism, school teachers and what else you might want to thrown in in order to be socially woke.

They still haven't fixed the main issue with ANW, and that is all the events are grip based and upper body. Hanging, climbing and a few agility obstacles made for a rock climbers body. Heavier body builders, and other athletes don't have nearly the same chance of succeeding as a 120 pound agile nerd. And women mostly have zero chance of finishing. I don't recall any obstacle ever using the legs besides the warped wall.

AJW has started down the path of America's Got Talent by adding a sob story to most every contestant. Please NBC don't ruin another show for me. Let the contestants compete.

Why has the show gotten filled with so many background narratives. We record and fast forward past all the useless filler fluff. We want to see more athletes on the course. Please just get back to showing the athletes running the course! If the stories get cut out, we'll increase our star rating.

Any more, it seems like they spend 10 minutes talking about a splinter a competitor got back in the second grade, then say, "while we were away, 37 more people ran the course..." I'd rather see the people running the course.

Here's a thought: 1) Cut the lengthy video montages for a special few and dedicate that time to the sport itself.

2) Post a leaderboard online showing all the competitors, their stats, their background and any videos (emotional and/or competitive), if applicable.

3) Once the playing field is down to a handful, THEN run the video montage of what they had to conquer (physically, emotionally, whatever) to get this far. At this point viewers should recognize the competitors and have picked favorites. This is the appropriate time to dedicate a minute to each player's backstory.

Again, it's just a slap in the face to those who have trained so hard just to get on the course only to be granted a 2 second recap after commercial because the producers chose to air long background videos on competitors who ended up disqualifying themselves on the first challenge.

I wish I could get access to the original Sasuke competitions.