Johnson County reality show champ is back for new TV season and challenge: Fatherhood

Dear MTV, the next time you cast Kansas City’s reality TV show veteran Wes Bergmann in a competition show, can we see him do something other than muck around blindfolded in a mud pit?

Like, how fast can he change a poopy diaper? He’s going to need some serious diaper skills soon, you know.

The 2003 Blue Valley North graduate hasn’t stopped competing on reality TV shows since the world met him in 2005 as a housemate on the 16th season of MTV’s “The Real World” in Austin, Texas.

From the get-go, MTV typecast Bergmann as “an obnoxious, super-competitive jock.” He was 20 then, a frat guy at Arizona State University “full of piss and vinegar” in Bergmann’s own words.

But he’s Wes 2.0 now — married, expecting his first child and living in his “forever home” in Leawood. He makes a living in two worlds: running a business incubator called Beta Blox and competing as a formidable and hard-charging opponent on competitive reality shows.

His very arrival on the scene makes competitors quake in their water shoes. You’ll see how starting Thursday when he stars in the second season of “The Challenge: USA,” a spinoff of MTV’s long-running reality competition series that will air on CBS.

The new season features 18 CBS veterans from “Survivor,” “Big Brother” and “The Amazing Race” and six veterans from MTV’s “The Challenge” family. The two people who avoid elimination, one man and one woman, will share a grand prize of $500,000.

According to the teaser promos, Bergmann was a surprise competitor, a three-time “Challenge” champion who arrived with fanfare on the back of a personal watercraft driven by seven-time “Challenge” winner Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio.

Uh oh.

“I think this might be a lot more difficult than I anticipated,” competitor Alyssa Snider from “Big Brother” said when she spied Bergmann.

In a conversation last week with The Star, Bergmann said he’s “pretty aware” and “proud” of how perceptions about him have changed all these years later. Super-competitive? Still that. But obnoxious? Cocky? He prefers “confident” and pointed out that he has the wins to back it up.

Viewers of this new “Challenge” are about to get “full-on Wes,” he promised.

“I’ve put a lot of work into it and had an unfair advantage in the sense that I get to see and read about myself. … It’s like game tape,” Bergmann said. “It’s why Patrick Mahomes watches footage not only of himself but others.

“I get that, and other people don’t. It’s an unfair thing.

“But I would also say that to anybody that overly judged me back in the day, on that first ‘Real World,’ just remember, if there was a camera following you around at age 20 for six straight months, you would act like an idiot yourself. Either that or you’d be incredibly boring …

“As proud as I am of where I’m at, as proud as I am of my maturity and growth, I think that I might have been more harshly criticized than I deserved to have been. I’ll take it.”

Living in the ‘Real World’

When Bergmann married his wife, “hometown girl” Amanda from Blue Springs in June 2018, several of his “Real World” co-stars came to Kansas City for the wedding. He feels fortunate to belong to the MTV family.

“I’m spoiled, in the sense that I got right off ‘The Real World’ roughly 20 years ago, the inventor of the entire genre so I consider it the Harvard of reality shows,” he said.

“And then I immediately went onto a competition show, ‘Real World: Road Rules Challenge,’ which was also the inventor of the genre of competition shows. … I just am very lucky and privileged to be on the Ferrari of shows like this.”

Recurring competitors like him are ingredients of the franchise’s secret sauce, he said, because fans get invested in their stories, that “soap opera” aspect.

“So even though yes, the fans get to tune in and watch us on the day to day, trying to navigate that particular game, they’re also able to weave story lines in from season to season that isn’t necessarily as possible with a competition show that has brand new people with no backstory and where the fans really don’t know where they’ve come from,” he said.

“So now people who have been on the show for a long time kinda have this backstory, where every time my face pops up on the screen, whatever I say … it’s got all this past story that’s floating around and creating an emotion around it.”

Danger? What danger?

“I think I can tell you it’s in Croatia. And that’s it,” Bergmann told The Star about the new “Challenge.” (Two CBS reps listened in on the interview.)

But he teased about something new coming.

“There was an element thrown into this game that I won’t explain … that they’ve never done before and I will definitely do again that caused a lot of anxiety amongst everyone,” he said. “It made it essentially to where no one was safe at any given time and it will live up to its name.

“They’ve teased it in a really really small way. You can kind of see it if you know what you’re looking for. I’m not even 100% sure that it will be introduced in the first episode. But this element, if you will, will be the most important character of the show.”

Could it be something dangerous? One of the promos shows two competitors swinging between two tall structures and in another scene, hot air balloons full of competitors float over water.

A woman in the voice-over says: “You are not in Kansas anymore.”

Bergmann said in all these years he’s only had one “close call” with catastrophe, an instance when he fell hard on the ground during one game when the size of the swimming pool intended to break his fall was miscalculated.

“I don’t know how I didn’t break a leg, but it was a really close call,” he said. “There’s a handful of stories that are in that realm, but at the end of the day I really do, considering how dangerous of stuff we’re doing, I have always felt safe.

“Some of my largest injuries in life have been from soccer more so than jumping out of helicopters and off of cliffs and stuff.

“How they do it? I’m not 100% sure, but I have a lot of trust and there’s a lot of proof for that trust in the safety team. So that one story I just gave you is a rare example.”

Becoming a father won’t necessarily make him rethink doing potentially dangerous things, he said.

“I don’t think I will hold anything back in that regard. I might be wrong. I don’t know what it’s like to be a dad yet. So ask me again in a few months,” he said. “If I die doing ‘The Challenge’ then my son or daughter is going to have a really cool story.

“I’m obviously just joking.

“I am more likely to get hurt in a car accident or staying home taking care of my son or daughter than I am going to ‘The Challenge’ and being protected by them at all times.”

Their baby is due in September, but the Bergmanns are waiting to find out if it’s a boy or girl.

He said he can’t tell if he’s “really, really prepared for fatherhood because I’ve jumped out of an airplane without a parachute on ‘The Challenge’ … or if I’m totally ill-prepared for the challenge of being a father because all I have been doing is working and jumping out of helicopters and airplanes and running ultra-marathons.

“I can’t tell if I’m naive or more prepared than the average bear. I (think) somewhere in between. But we shall see.”

He didn’t have an answer for the question: Are you going to let your kids watch these shows?

“It’s just a little bit, I guess, how well they understand the nuance of things and maybe not necessarily showing things in chronological order because if I did, that would take literal years because I’ve been on a lot of TV,” he said.

“In some way, shape or form, they’re going to have to be brought aside whenever they’re ready and explain that their dad is not like other dads.”

Where to watch ‘The Challenge’

The two-part premiere of “The Challenge: USA” airs at 9 p.m. Thursday and 8 p.m. Sunday on CBS and streams on Paramount+. New episodes will air on Thursdays and Sundays for the first three weeks, then move to just Thursdays beginning Aug. 31.