An MTV press release also said TRW: Brooklyn would also be broken into hour long episodes (even before filming has begun.) I have a feeling they found the formula worked better (with a full hour to engage the audience.)

My best guess is we see hour long episodes of the next challenge with the good boost in ratings (over I3) and audience retention they saw with G3.

Yeah it adds a certain freshness to it and also they have more time to work with storylines instead of trying to jam it into a half hour pr spread it over too many weeks. Plus I think they have done a better job at the editing with it too. Not to say that the other seasons weren't good(Thank Sydney for giving us a certain persian)

awesome.

MTV looked around at its competition (VH1, BRAVO, Oxygen, Lifetime, etc) and realized that everyone but E! had moved to the hour reality format some time ago.

One problem with being on top for so long is not realizing the advances in programming made by your competition. As you can tell from the early episodes of Hollywood, the editors were still thinking in half hour blocks, also, while Gauntlet 3 played as an hour show, it was planned an produced in Mexico with the expectation of being a 30 min show. Now that MTV has dictated 60 min challenge episodes, production must orient its thinking to an entirely new production dynamic, otherwise it's just two 30 min shows glued together.

Innovation and progress from, imagine that.

Ah very well said there

On some things we will simply have to trust Bacchus because if he tried to explain how he knows what he knows, his sources would be obvious to MTV and the production company. It's one thing to have a little fun with this and see what we can collectively discover as people do with The Amazing Race, but it is quite another to expose the sources to potential retaliation by saying too much.

Sometimes questions can be answered privately, by PM, and need not be made completely public. I'm always more comfortable providing more information privately. There are some things I just won't post on any message board.

Personally, I've been impressed with how responsible Bacchus has been with information that has come his way. It is one of the principal reasons I found my way here, and the most important reason that I've stayed.

Nice, I can't wait.

So are we thinking late this year or early next year for the first episode?

I wish I could read minds inside MTV. The have all gone a little cloudy as ratings overall have dipped and people have been told to produce or get the Hell out. One interview in a NY paper said Brooklyn will air in January or at least after the first of the year. That leaves November sweeps currently uncovered on Wed at 10 pm without a traditional Bunim/Murray produced show.

If I were programming for MTV, that is when I would air the show, but I would not program a start date until I knew where in the sequence of episodes are the most dramatic/salable ones (aka Beth/Coral during sweeps for Gauntlet 3). Then I would schedule that episode in the middle of sweeps and take home the best ratings possible.

Why are sweeps ratings important? They are the benchmarks for future advertising revenue. Many people forget that TV is first and foremost a business with investors who demand results or new management who will deliver the biggest profits soonest.

So then, are we certain that the upcoming Challenge is a new competition style, or are we just assuming so?

Cuz I would think that the challenge will be something new that we haven't seen before, but obviously others would know better than I.

I don't make any assumptions, but I do assess probability.

I think I wrote elsewhere that the challenge was advertised to the cast as being different; "Survivor Style" were the exact words used by a producer when the invites were issued. The cast was totally in the dark when they left, or so they told their families/significant others. In fact, speculation among the cast ran even wider than the most crazed fan speculation with one cast member suggesting that all the old Survivor immunity challenges from 'Pearl Islands' could be reused for this challege. That, of course, is a little silly, since CBS as a company was spun off from Viacom which owns MTV networks. MTV would have to buy the rights to portions of Survivor, and since they barely pay they cast anything, I can't see them forking over big bucks to CBS and Mark Burnett.

Based on the cast not knowing the format of this challenge, and the fact that going back at least six challenges in my work experience the cast has known every format before leaving home, I assess the probability as high that this challenge is different. The few hundred people on message boards who care about spoilers don' t rate BMP working so hard to keep the format quiet if they are simply redoing the same old, tired stuff. I mean, why go to the trouble of hiding "sliders?" JMO