American Ninja Warrior

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.

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.

Hi, Used to be a fan, but now the episodes are all talk and profiles. I was just watching one and I only saw two contestants attempt the course, this was in a span of 16 minutes. And after some ads they showed highlights of around four others who undertook the course ... How about we see these attempts in full instead of all of the profiles, interviews and repetitive talk.

It should only take around one episode per region. However, it is being stretched out and distorted. But not with the competitors attempts but with talking and other stuff. This is a disadvantage to the competition as viewers like myself lose interest.

I did not finish watching and switched channel.

cheers

I have been a huge Sasuke and ANW fan but the last couple of seasons of ANW have gone way overboard on fluff pieces.

I think it is very disrespectful to the other competitors to have their runs skipped over to make room for all of this uninteresting backstory. Let everyone tell their story on the course, not in a lame bio which runs longer than their actual obstacle course run.

Everyone has a story and issues in life to deal with... the ones who hardly get to be seen are not being treated fairly. Maybe show some of the fluff in a little window while they are running, but these overproduced segments are just terrible TV and are hogging up the whole episode ...just NO...STOP IT!!!!

Between commercials, fluff pieces and fluff after interviews on the sideline, there really is only about 10 minutes of actual competition. If this trend continues, I will be skipping ANW alltogether as the skip button is getting worn out on the remote as it stands now.

Since Casey's run and climbing of the wall, women have been included more and more on the show and I think it is good to have women included, but the courses are getting too nerfed to cater to lesser athletes and this is also taking away from the sport. Additionally, it is disrespectful to women to have a female announcer relegated to the sidelines and only get to ask fluff questions instead of being able to announce the runs as they are happening. I think if you want to be inclusive to women , that needs to be changed as well.

TLDR, cut out the fluff which runs longer than the contestants actual runs and toughen the course up to make it a legitimate competition again.

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.