Welcome to this installment of context clues where we share excerpts from past episodes

to give you a more complete background on the topic at hand.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American History.

When an early reality show called Jackass premiered on MTV in the year 2000, it smashed

viewership records for the network and led to smashed shopping carts in department store

parking lots across America.

Suddenly, suburban tweens and teens started writing them violently into trimmed hedges and

pushing each other out of them straight onto the cement, emulating the pranks and stunts

performed by a group of nihilistic skateboarders and carnival-esque performers.

Ones that sold them a vision of hilarious self-destruction that my 12-year-old self

found to be pretty fun indeed.

These guys brought gross out humor to living rooms across the world.

They brought public pranks that confused and even horrified the unsuspecting onlookers

they caught on tape, and they brought incredibly stupid stunts that included everything from

getting in the ring with an angry bull to jumping out of a tree to endure a bungee

wedgie.

Our upcoming series on Jackass is going to focus on how these guys came together to create

this explosive franchise, the skate culture that facilitated their friendship, and the

handful of serious copycat injuries that led to a moral panic about how the show was leading

a stray, the youth of America.

We'll also try to understand the impetus of Jackass by looking at the coming of age

of those who starred in it, Gen X, and what caused their generation to be defined as nihilistic

...