Last night’s Skywire with Nik Wallenda garnered 40,000 tweets a minute. I feel like that’s a pretty amazing statistic, and I also feel pretty strongly that 60% of those 40,000 tweets were most likely about Nik’s amazing jeans.
If you're Nik Wallenda, you have one night of national television where all eyes will be literally on your lower body. There are no guidelines and you aren’t limited to what you can wear; in fact, you have the option to choose from literally any piece of clothing in existence currently. And of all the articles of clothing you can choose from to put on your body, you choose a pair of thigh-hugging bell-bottom jeans that accentuate your thunder thighs exceptionally. You choose a pair of pants that, totally separate from last night’s show, are incredibly offensive on their own. If these pants happened to be seen in any normal setting, on any normal guy just strolling down any normal street, they would be offensive to me. So I’m not making special rules for TV here.
Yes, Nik Wallenda was at risk of plummeting to his death on national television, but the more perilous thing last night was his jeans situation. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them; they were mesmerizing. The only thing worse than watching him waddle down that rope at a painfully slow pace, wasting everyone’s time (including Jesus’) was when the camera switched to the backside angle, and I had to watch him waddle from behind.
Every time I screamed “Gah! I can’t watch,” or “Ugh, I have to look away!” my friends all thought I was referring to the dangers of the tight-rope task. But what I was really referring to was Nik’s Apple Bottom jeans all up in my face, making me a terrible combination of angry and uncomfortable.
It made me even more pissed when he kept bringing Jesus into this mess. Every time he chunked up a prayer to the big man upstairs, I secretly chunked up one of my own that Jesus was actually REALLY busy last night with other, more important things (hopefully monitoring Amanda Bynes’ Twitter activity). But then I quickly recanted that prayer, not out of guilt, but out of the realization that I’d NEVER want anyone to interfere with Amanda Bynes’ Twitter activity—it is a primary source of entertainment for me most evenings, and I dread the day where I won’t be able to settle in for the night with a nice cup of hot tea and a good Amanda Bynes Twitter feed rant. So yeah, just stay out of that, God.
And then, just like that, the torture was over; Nik Wallenda and his jeans had made it safely to the other side, quickly being enveloped by a crowd of people and slowly slipping away from my TV screen forever. I knew there would be latent repercussions of this night—I knew that the image of Nik Wallenda’s beefy sausage thighs swaddled tightly in jean material would remain etched into my mind for at least the next few days—but I decided I’d deal with my post traumatic stress later. For now, I’d just curl up on the couch, relax and watch the next show…
BIG. MISTAKE.
The Discovery Channel put me through a lot of emotional turmoil last night, and Nik Wallenda’s jeans was only the beginning of it, because next I was subjected to the horror that was “Naked and Afraid.”
“Naked and Afraid” is basically a couple of dirty, buck-naked, mud-caked lunatics running around carrying machetes and eating turtles, and then vomiting into the bushes for days on end, and it’s literally the worst show I’ve ever watched. Naturally, my boyfriend immediately hit “Record Series” and proceeded to not hear one word I said for the entirety of the show.
Also, apparently along with a sense of humor, stupidly tiptoing across a piece of rope strung across the Grand Canyon where you could violently plunge to your death at any second gets you chicks. How else can you explain how Nik landed his wife?
So guys, if you’re not funny, you might wanna take up tight-rope walking, go jeans shopping at your local JC Pennys and then just hope for the best.
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Clay asks, what's next for television with the ratings success of Nik Wallenda's Grand Canyon walks?
