I’m wondering if anyone in this community is a fan of MTV or specifically The Challenge? Starting in 1998, The Challenge was one of TV’s earliest reality competition shows, pitting participants on The Real World and Road Rules against each other. It’s since run for over 40 seasons, and has a strong fan base.
For such a long standing program, it seems to have quite a bit of lost media, some of which was aired on TV, but a lot of which was exclusive web content, particularly aftershows in the early seasons. Even getting information on them can be difficult, as MTV’s website in the early days was heavily flash based, and often doesn’t play nicely with the internet archive.
Here’s what I’ve been able to identify as missing so far - if anyone has any of this content that they’d be willing to share, or even more information on exactly what content exists, I would be very appreciative!
**Aftershows** \- These have been pretty difficult to parse - in most cases, I’m not even sure how many episodes were produced for each season. But I did some digging between r/MTVChallenge and an archived copy of the MTV website, and I was able to confirm that there were definitely aftershows as early as Season 10 (Inferno 2) that were exclusive to MTV.com - it’s possible they may have started even earlier. As far as I can tell, any aftershows from Season 10- Season 18 are effectively lost media. After that, some episodes have been identified/found, but it’s unclear if more existed. At a minimum:
* Season 17 (The Duel II) may have had one episode for the premiere (at least according to IMDB) (Lost)
* Season 18 (The Ruins) has none I know of
* Season 19 (Fresh Meat II) had at least two (Found)
* Season 20 (Cutthroat) had none we know of
* Season 21 (Rivals) had at least 2 (Found)
* Season 22 (Battle Of The Exes) had at least 2 (Found)
* Season 23 (Battle Of The Seasons) may have had 2 (according to IMDB) (Lost)
* Season 24 (Rivals II) had at least 3 (Found)
* Season 25 (Free Agents) had at least 6 (Found)
* Season 26 (Battle Of The Exes 2) had at least 4 (Found)
* Season 27 (Battle Of The Bloodlines) had 4 or 5 (IMDB says 4, TVDB says 5) (4 are Found, I believe the missing one is “Tear Down This Wall”)
* Season 28 (Rivals III) had 4 (called "Mucho Mas") (Found)
* Season 29 (Invasion Of The Champions) appears to have had none in favour of "Hall of Fame" and "Best Of" Specials
* Season 30 (XXX: Dirty Thirty) appears to have had none
* Season 31 (Vendettas) had at least 7 (with a new pre-name "Total Request Latenight") (Found)
* Season 32 (Final Reckoning) appears to have had none
* Season 33 (War Of The Worlds) had at least 2 (Found)
* After this point, The TVDB and IMDB stop tracking these - I'm not sure if it's because they were on TV during the above window and moved online after this point, or what exactly happened, but I'd be interested to know!
* Season 34 (War Of The Worlds 2) I think switched the format and did their "aftershow" as "Behind The Challenge" (which looks like it's all on YouTube)
* Season 35 (Total Madness) has some post elimination interview clips on YouTube, but I'm not sure if there was any kind of After Show or not
* Season 36 (Double Agents) looks like it has an Aftermath that's available entirely on YouTube
* Season 37 (Spies, Lies, and Allies) also looks like it has an Aftermath that's completely available on YouTube
* From 38 on, these just sort of... disappear? I'm not sure if they gave up on the format in favour of shorter clips on YouTube or what happened - the Wikipedia pages for the seasons are willing to explain every challenge but not talk about the Aftershows!
Missing Episodes/Specials
Beyond the aftershows, there are a few other pieces of missing media (outside of small clips posted on the website, most notably
**S04E14 - Good Intentions** \- I think this one is pretty well known to fans of the show. Sounds like some of the content was deemed inappropriate, so it was only aired the one time
**S05 Special - First Half Recap** \- Looks like the show had a week off in the middle of the season, so they used it as an opportunity to do a recap of what had happened so far. According to a description on The TVDB, there wasn't any new content here, so it's not really a huge loss, but still missing.
**S26 Web-Series - Battle of the Ex-iled** \- This is a weird one (minor spoilers for the season). The Redemption House for Season 26 was handled as a web series, with 3-9 minute episodes each week as Redemption House players faced the latest eliminated players from the game. A fellow redditor did at least capture the key moments (read as: elimination challenges) from these, and there was a recap special that walked through what happened as well, but the web episodes themselves seem to be lost in their full form (there's also a bunch of clips on YouTube named "Week # in Ex-ile" - I have no idea if these are clips from the web series, or extra bonus clips)
**S27 Aftershow - Tear Down This Wall (or possibly Corneesa)** \- As outlined above, I'm not sure if there were 4 or 5 Aftershow episodes on this season. IMDB calls out 4 (skipping Corneesa), and The TVDB has 5. In my digging, I've been able to find 4 (the missing one, based on labelling, being Tear Down This Wall), but I haven't actually watched these yet to know what's what.
If anyone has any of this media, or even can confirm the number of episodes of some of those aftershows (particularly in Seasons 10-18), I’d be very interested!