Fox reboots Fear Factor, presumably sans Joe Rogan
It’s almost hard to believe that it took until mid 2025 for a network to reboot the show that helped take podcaster and horse medicine evangelist Joe Rogan from NewsRadio bit player to… well, podcaster and horse medicine evangelist. Ahead of Fox’s upfront presentation this morning, the network announced a reboot series with the working title Fear Factor: The Next Chapter. Per Deadline, the synopsis for the rebooted series is: “Dropped into a remote location, a group of strangers will live together under one roof, and face stunts, challenges and a game of social strategy.”
The original series ran on NBC from 2001 until 2006, with a brief comeback in 2011. In 2017, MTV also briefly tried to relaunch the series with Ludacris hosting; that version ran for 33 episodes. Deadline reports that Fox hasn’t dated the series yet, nor is there any indication that a host has yet been selected. One would assume that Rogan would rather prioritize the podcast that makes him extremely rich and popular without ever having to compromise his content to the will of a network, but who knows.
Elsewhere, Fox also picked up one of NBC’s other scrapped game shows, albeit with a slight twist. Celebrity Weakest Link will air on Fox on Monday evenings, with Jane Lynch returning to host. The network has also picked up 99 To Beat, an imported series based on a Belgian game show. Ken Jeong will host that one, which is described with the premise “100 contestants go head-to-head in a range of games. There’s only one rule: Don’t come last.” There must be a second rule somewhere in that, but we’ll see when it premieres this fall on Wednesday nights.