The Challenge: USA wrapped up its first season with a brutal hike in Patagonia, but the show's "final" was also a brutal viewing experience. The inaugural season of The Challenge: USA pitted alumni from various CBS reality competition shows against one another. The series, a spin-off of MTV's The Challenge, featured former competitors from Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race, and Love Island. Throughout the game, alliances and control shifted, but the primary drivers of the narrative momentum were the Survivor and Big Brother veterans, whose strategic chops led to some of the season's more thrilling moments.
Ultimately, it was two former Survivor players who emerged victorious in host TJ Lavin's final, splitting the $500,000 grand prize. Survivor 41's Danny McCray, a former NFL player, was the first to finish the demanding final, passing front-runner Tyson Apostol at a Sudoku checkpoint near the finish line. After Tyson, Domenick Abbate, Cayla Platt, and Justine Ndiba were unable to finish the Sudoku puzzle, former Survivor winner Sarah Lacina came from behind to claim victory for the women's side.
All in all, the finale of The Challenge: USA was absolutely disastrous from a production standpoint, making for a head-scratching viewing experience. The problems started when Angela Rummans, the favorite to win on the women's side, was disqualified during a round of the final that would require her to dig alone all night while the other competitors worked in pairs, a result of the lopsided gender division following Ben Driebergen's medical evacuation. Angela, realizing there was no chance she would be able to complete the challenge, decided to rest to conserve her strength for the next round and take the minimum amount of points, allotted to the last-place finisher of the round. She likely based her decision on the fact that Justine had failed to complete a task in a previous round of the final and received last-place points. Instead, Angela was informed of her disqualification the next morning, which was confusing for viewers, especially because the producers didn't appear to clearly inform Angela of the rules surrounding her decision.
The issues continued with the ill-conceived Sudoku checkpoint, which inarguably cost Tyson the game. A long-distance endurance athlete, Tyson held a massive lead over Danny and Domenick, but he was unfamiliar with Sudoku and only had "Finish the pattern" as instructions for the task. Faced with freezing cold weather and unable to solve the puzzle, he and every other competitor except for Danny and Sarah were shown quitting the task. Several of the players involved have stated in interviews and on social media that they were forced to quit by production rather than timing out like in previous rounds and have expressed immense dissatisfaction with the show's production.
What was clear through watching the final of The Challenge: USA was that the production team seemed to be making up some rules on the fly and inconsistently enforcing others. It made for a frustrating viewing experience and must have been far more frustrating as a participant. It was such a disaster that it has irreversibly soured some contestants on the show, which will likely hurt recruitment for big name talent from Survivor and Big Brother for future seasons. Danny and Sarah undoubtedly deserved their wins, as they played the hand they were dealt, but the production of the season finale was undeniably messy, making it clear that the other CBS reality staples run much tighter ships than The Challenge USA.
Source: Domenick Abbate/Twitter, Sarah Atwood/Twitter