'One Man Army,'
lots of fun to watch
Discovery Channel series takes itself quite seriously
By Tom Conroy
Jul 13, 2011
Back in the ’70s and ’80s, before the term “reality TV” came into wide circulation, a genre known as “trash sports” flourished. Such shows as “The Superstars,” “Battle of the Network Stars” and “The World’s Strongest Man” featured celebrities and athletes participating in unfamiliar or absurd competitions, usually with ironically deadpan play-by-play, most famously provided by the sportscaster Howard Cosell.
The Discovery Channel’s new series “One Man Army,” which pits men with military or law-enforcement skills against one another in timed tests designed to show off those skills, is played even straighter than those earlier shows, but the fun is the same. Although preteen boys might swallow the show’s claim that it is discovering elite warriors, grown-ups can contentedly flash back to the joys of watching Gabe Kaplan and Robert Conrad compete in a relay race.
In the premiere episode, airing tonight at 10 p.m., the fun begins with the first sight of the deadly serious host, Mykel Hawke, who says he’s a survival expert and former Green Beret. He has one of those gritty announcer voices that are always odd to see coming from a human face.
Biting into every line, Hawke explains to the four contestants that they will be participating in three competitions, each one resulting in the elimination of the slowest competitor. The winner, he says, will earn $10,000 and “the title of One Man Army.”
Three of the contestants in the premiere are standard macho men with extensive military or police experience. The fourth, Jeff, who is the smallest and youngest, is a gun expert. If we weren’t already rooting for him, we start to as soon as the biggest guy, a U.S. Marshal named Kevin, tells him he talks too much. Kevin offers to throw Jeff out of the truck driving them to the staging ground.
The three competitions, Hawke says, are each intended to test one quality: speed, strength or intelligence. For the speed round, the contestants traverse a rope line, run through a junk-filled obstacle course that has been mined with something that looks and sounds like firecrackers and shoot at a box that they have to knock off a ledge.
The competitions are as entertaining to watch as the old “Superstars” races or the challenges on “Survivor.” Hawke’s narration becomes progressively graver and funnier, right up to when he tells the loser, “I hate to say it, but the extraction van awaits.”
In the strength competition, the three remaining contestants have to break through a series of doors and walls, with tools and without. The intelligence competition is a two-man race to see which finalist can escape from a locked jail cell quickest.
All of the contestants give solemn sound bites about why they want to win, except for Jeff, who, without getting too sarcastic, treats the show with all the respect it deserves. After finishing one race, he raises his arms and shouts, “Are you not entertained?”
As those trash-sports shows proved years back — and as “Survivor” continues to prove — it can be fun to watch other people perform in competitions that are one step removed from the three-legged race at the annual office picnic. On top of that, the premiere of “One Man Army” lucks out by having a dramatically satisfying winner — assuming, as we must, that the producers didn’t fake the whole thing.
A last-minute revelation gives a little extra resonance to the outcome.
Irony-proof viewers will simply cheer the winner. What’s unusual is that those of us who take “One Man Army” with a grain of salt will also have a decent time.
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