Part fight tournament, part male soap opera, Spike TV's long-running series "The Ultimate Fighter" has launched the career of dozens of UFC fighters.
But critics of the show point to the sometimes outlandish behavior of the fighters residing in the "TUF" house as a potential black-eye on the still-growing sport of mixed martial arts.
While the antics began in season one with Chris Leben and reached a fever pitch on the eighth edition with Junie Browning, Spike TV senior vice president Brian Diamond insists his network isn't actively seeking miscreants for the sake of ratings.
"There's a couple of things that are just taking place naturally in society and pop culture," Diamond told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). "Anybody who's between the ages 21 and 34 most of the guys are probably in their 20s that come here they're living in a society where reality television is around them all the time. They're vlogging. They're blogging. They're on websites and Tweeting. The idea of having a sense of personality and being visual, it's something that's part of their normal lives.
"We're finding it, I wouldn't say easier, but less of a challenge for guys to come in with some level of personality."
Each season, hundreds of hopefuls show up to open tryouts around the globe hoping to get picked for the show based on their grappling and striking prowess. But the final stage of approval is an interview process where television executives try to determine who will provide a personality suitable for Spike TV airwaves.
But Diamond insists the company isn't actively seeking potential train wrecks.
"The reality is, with Junie, he came to us," Diamond said. "It wasn't like we said, 'Let's go find us a Junie Browning.' That guy was in casting two other times before he actually got cast on the show.
"The tough part with him is like anything else. You see a guy who's got raw talent and abilities, it's just his demons got in the way. You really wanted to give him an opportunity to see if he could weed those demons out. Unfortunately, it didn't necessarily happen, but it's like an MMA fight: you don't know how it's going to end until it ends because anything can happen in the last five seconds of the third round."
Diamond points to a particular member of the current 12th season of "The Ultimate Fighter," featuring UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre and challenger Josh Koscheck in coaching roles, as the perfect example of how personalities can prove interesting without being destructive.
"[Fighters] know; they see the show," Diamond said. "They know that they have to be interesting. They don't have to be crazy, necessarily, but they just have to be interesting personalities.
"You watch Jonathan Brookins this season, and compared to 'Bruce Leeroy' (Alex Caceres), he's more low-key, but he's just as interesting. People want to get in his head and know who he is. There's almost an aura and a mystery around him. He's not boring. That's the difference."
Some critics suggest "The Ultimate Fighter" has run its course. Designed as a means to introduce the public to MMA, the show follows a similar format from season to season. Some suggest that format is stale, but Diamond disagrees.
"We challenge ourselves," Diamond said. "The fights to get into the house, adding the wild card, trying to find a unique combination of coaches whether it's Tito (Ortiz) and Chuck (Liddell), Rashad (Evans) and 'Rampage' (Jackson) or when Kimbo Slice came into the mix, those are things that we try to challenge ourselves on. But the reality is, people are still watching it.
"That would be like saying, I'm not going to watch the Daytona 500 because it's the same race ever year. Well, there are different drivers. We don't know what's going to happen. That's the reality, and in those things, they don't even tweak anything. They don't go like, 'Oh, the top three seeds have to be 50 yards back in the pack.' It's the same race.
"Super Bowl. World Series. The designated hitter was the last real big thing that entered baseball years ago. We always challenger ourselves to try and come up with something interesting and different, but we don't want to do anything contrived. We don't want to make it feel unorganic to the process."
Diamond points to UFC matchmaker Joe Silva's involvement in the selection process as proof of the value of the show. And while the Spike TV executive believes the show is still viable as entertaining programming, he believes there is also a real demand for "The Ultimate Fighter" by the mixed martial arts community.
"You see the change in the quality of the guys who come through here," Diamond said. "Used to be, you'd see guys who are really skilled in one set or another, or guys who were real novices who were just coming here for the fun of it. Now you see guys who are really dead serious and are more four- or five-tool players.
"We've also changed the qualifications a little bit. You have to have three pro fights. We were starting to get a lot of guys that would walk up to the table that had amateur records or no records at all. The skill-level is such that you've got to really know what you're doing to be on the show and get into the UFC. To that extent, it's really good because the quality of the guys is great, and I think there's even more of them out there that are even better."
