I’d be surprised if any kids these days have even heard of MTV, but back in the ‘90s, it was a cultural juggernaut. Not only did the network’s music videos dictate which artists were in; they were on the cutting edge of comedy with shows like Beavis and Butt-Head and Jackass. Whereas Beavis and Butt-Head has been brought back for a streaming reboot, Jackass has long since graduated from the small screen and become a blockbuster movie franchise.
Compared to the films, which have everything from explosions to anaconda bites to a flying porta-potty filled to the brim with fecal matter, the Jackass TV show looks tame in retrospect. But there’s something charming about the run-and-gun, man-on-the-street approach, and there’s something refreshing about seeing the jackasses pre-fame, when no one in their elaborate pranks was liable to recognize them.
In honor of the release of Jackass: Best and Last — the fifth and final Jackass film; a nostalgic look back on two-and-a-half decades of bad taste, horrific injuries, and male bonding — Paramount+ has dropped fully restored and uncensored cuts of all three seasons of Jackass’ original TV series, and it’s a great nostalgic binge. I’ve been a Jackass superfan since childhood, but I haven’t seen some of those TV episodes since I was a kid (and, in some cases, I hadn’t seen them at all), so it was a lot of fun to binge-watch those old episodes back-to-back all these years later.
Some of those early stunts still hold up as all-time classics, like the late, great Ryan Dunn swimming in raw sewage, being forced to eat dinner outside, and having footballs pelted at his head. The show moves at such a zippy pace that, even when a bit doesn’t quite work or a stunt doesn’t give you the thrill you’re looking for, it jumps straight into the next one.
When it premiered in 2000, Jackass was a huge hit, but it also sparked widespread controversy. Senator Joseph Lieberman waged war against Jackass in the political arena, and called on MTV to cancel the series. Johnny Knoxville ultimately ended the show to avoid being forced to do a safe, sanitized, supervised version of Jackass (and that’s when they made the leap to the big screen, and never looked back).
Jackass was a hotbed of controversy, but when you go back and watch the original TV show today, much like when you go back and read Catcher in the Rye, you might find yourself wondering what all the fuss was about. It was so outrageously controversial in its time, but by modern standards, it doesn’t seem so bad. Next to the Jackass movies, the TV show looks quaint. The TV show has the “Poo Cocktail,” but the movies have the “Poo Cocktail Supreme,” featured as one of the greatest hits in Best and Last.
But once you actually put on an episode and start watching it, it immediately becomes clear why it was so controversial. Every episode has “do not imitate” warnings plastered all over it — not just the standard warnings at the beginning and end of every episode (like they did with the movies), but an additional warning on every ad break and, on particularly dangerous or particularly imitable stunts, they would have a banner running across the screen, begging viewers not to try this at home.
All those warnings point to the biggest problem with the show: no matter how much MTV warned people, and how severe these warnings got, people kept imitating the stunts they saw, and, naturally, as the skull-and-crutchbones logo suggested would happen, a lot of them got hurt. Jackass was a transgressive masterpiece, but there were a few viewers who missed that and just saw something that looked fun.
