Legends Of The Hidden Temple revival demolished at The CW
The adult-focused reboot of the kids' game show lasted just 13 episodes at the network
Aux News Legends Of The Hidden Temple
Granting a real-world answer to an old question—i.e., “Is there a practical and exact limit to how far nostalgia can let you coast?”—The CW has announced today that it’s ending its Legends Of The Hidden Temple revival after a single season on the air.
The most shocking thing about the news, honestly, is that the series didn’t get dragged off by an actor dressed like a vaguely Mesoamerican-themed “temple guard” sooner; The CW has not been shy about its kills lately, wiping huge swathes of programming off of its schedule in recent weeks. Legends, as one of the lowest-rated shows on the network, was definitely due.
The basic premise of the series was pretty ingenious, admittedly: Rather than casting a bunch of kids with only the vaguest recollection of the original Nickelodeon series to run around its simulated jungle and fuck up that fucking Silver Monkey—straight! The head has to go on fucking straight! Jesus Christ!—the show instead focused on adults who were once kids watching said show, convinced that they’d handle The Pit Of Despair soooooo much better than those Space Camp-denied dweebs.
And yet, despite that obvious hook, the series—hosted by Cristela Alonzo, and with Dee Bradley Baker and Kirk Fogg both reprising their parts from the original, which ran for 120 episodes at Nickelodeon in the ’90s—audiences do not appear to have bitten. Per TV Line, the new Legends (not to be confused with any other CW Legends shows we might still be bitter about losing) was the the third-lowest-rated series on the channel over the last TV season. (Only marching-based docu-series March and the second season of Killer Camp, which got yanked off the network after just two installments, did worse.)
There is, at least, one silver lining to the show’s demise: Adult former Nickelodeon fans will presumably stop demanding, every few months like clockwork, that “They should revive Legends Of The Hidden Temple! I’d watch the crap out of that!” You didn’t; now it’s dead.
14 Comments
That’s a bummer but, in fairness, I barely remembered the revival was a thing.
Wasn’t the other Legends show cancelled because they couldn’t continue using their set or something? Seems like the obvious solution would have been to just combine these two shows.
You might be sarcastic here but I would watch the shit out of a season of Legends of Tomorrow structured around a nostalgic gameshow.
The lease on the soundstage was up. But there was always a good chance it was going to be cancelled anyway.
A crossover between this show and Legends of Tomorrow would have been a blast. So much potential fun left on the table with the cancellation of LoT. Nice job CW
I had forgotten this was even a thing until I caught an episode randomly one day. I watched half. It was terrible. It looked staged. Like you hired a bunch of bad actors to film a skit about being on a game show.
Putting it on a Sunday, against the Big 4’s spotlight, well-entrenched shows, didn’t do it any favors. Would have probably done slightly better if it had been held off and put on the Saturday block after Whose Line.
Then again, the show itself had a lot of problems. Chief among them was pacing. The original show featured six teams competing in six rounds per half-hour, but the CW version had four teams competing in five rounds for an entire hour. Round 1, the moat, took 10 goddamn minutes in the CW version. What they needed to do is cut the “interview cam” segments, trim the moat down to a simple race, and fit the entire game into a half-hour.
The Temple Run was mostly fine, but there was one room that ALWAYS got everyone snagged. You had to take five accessories (IIRC, it was a headdress, a necklace, a shield, an anklet, and a gauntlet or bracelet) and place them on a mannequin, and it killed every single run. And for those who were curious, yes, one team did, in fact, get tied up at the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. Dude took over 30 seconds to get the statue together.
One weird thing about it was that the first team eliminated didn’t get any consolation prizes. After the moat round, they go to the Steps of Knowledge, where another team is eliminated. After that, DBB does an ad reel where the losing team gets to keep their LotHT shirts and a prize pack of branded Legends stuff, implying that the team who lost the moat doesn’t even get to keep their shirts.
Another weird thing is that somebody higher up really didn’t like the microphone Cristela used during the game, as literally every time she wasn’t on-screen or had her back to the camera, her lines were VERY obviously dubbed over in post. So you have Cristela facing the camera with her voice sounding very much like someone who is outdoors, but then in the next shot, sometimes while in the middle of a sentence even, she’ll be off-screen and suddenly her voice sounds like she’s in a recording booth with soundproof walls.
BTW, in CW non-cancel news, Whose Line is it Anyway? is returning for an 11th season (19th overall if you count the Drew Carey episodes), though whether they’ll record more episodes or use even more leftover footage is unknown. They’re apparently planning on airing it in hour-blocks again, so maybe a new recording session is in store after all.
As an adult, it’s impossible not to realize that the temple guards were a simple way to keep anyone they don’t want to win from winning.
A bummer but not unexpected. I was pretty won over by it; having the contestants be 90s kids like myself was clever (we’re the only ones who were gonna be watching this) and I thought it captured the feeling of “what would LOTHT feel like to a 30 something in the same way the original felt to an 11 year old?” (the moat is actually a lake, the temple is actually huge, etc). I was glad it didn’t stray from the original format (moat/Steps/Games/Temple) and the theme music was worthy of its predecessor: I dug its Uncharted-y vibe. Plus, the Queen’s Armory was the new Silver Monkey in killing everyone’s dream dead (the revival did have around the same 25% win rate as the original, THE FIX IS IN).I know some balked at the hour runtime and contestant cams but I thought they were handled well. Obviously, these are production necessities: CW wasn’t going to spend that much money on just half-hour chunks when they needed to fill hour long gaps in their schedule but also couldn’t spend TOO much money (hence, 13 possible winners instead of 26) but ALSO ALSO didn’t want to stray too far from the original format. I liked that the cams were only Amazing Race-style bite-sized comments to both dig into the people we’re going to watch for an hour and didn’t venture beyond the game; the avoidance of home life kept up the kayfabe in being in Olmec’s area. And it was neat to hear what it was like to do a Temple Game or Run as a grown ass person (spoilers: TIRING). Overall, I wished it went longer but I very much enjoyed it while it was around.
I didn’t even realize that it was on the air.
“the show instead focused on adults who were once kids watching said show”. See this is what I thought they were going for, but from what it looked like on the few episodes I watched, most contestanta seemed college aged (i.e younger than me and I was like 2-5 when the show was on the air) and wouldn’t have even seen the original show when it was on the air. Not that it was the reason the show was bad (show length was my issue with it) but something I noticed and was in the front of my mind when watching.
Not surprising…to me. For me, the real disappointment was that the revival just was not good. It felt stale and empty and just not exciting at all. It seemed like they were filming in someone’s backyard. They really could’ve benefited from larger scale outdoor sets, and having a live audience (I know…probably filmed during the height of Covid) would have helped a lot. I’d have filmed at night with lots of fire effects and such, but I understand they probably did not have the budget for all this. The host Cristela also did not feel like a good fit…way too low-key. And they should’ve kept the original series’ music, if possible…that was iconic to the show. The generic jungle theme music they used for the reboot just underscored how blah it was.I tried to stick with it, but I probably let the last 5 or 6 episodes stack up on my DVR, and eventually I deleted them all without watching.
So the problem wasn’t that the show was based on retrograde colonialist ideas of Indigenous cultures? Huh.