The Genius of Ultimate Beastmaster

The Genius of Ultimate Beastmaster
By Gabe LLanas

Sylvester Stallone is the Executive Producer on what may be one of the most ingenious shows that Netflix has released to date, and it is probably going to make him a pile of money. If you aren’t familiar with the premise of the show, it is a competition between 108 athletes from 6 different countries on a Ninja Warrior style obstacle course called The Beast. As they tackle the course they are slowly eliminated until there is one winner for each of the nine episodes of the season, with a finally pitting the nine winners against each other to reveal the Ultimate Beastmaster. Fairly straight forward show that, has been done several times on network television, so what makes it such a smart show.
So each othe the six countries represented in the show (U.S., Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Germany), have their own announcer team, and each have access to Netflix. So the whole series was filmed in 8 days with each of the announcers presenting the show making it easy for editors to cut the shows for 6 different regional and linguistic markets covering most of the world. So for 8 days of filming they effectively have the ability to release 60 hours of content that can be enjoyed by the nearly 200 countries that Netflix is available in.
As far as the show itself it is good, a fun obstacle course show that owes a lot to the originator Ninja Warrior. With the release style that Netflix uses (that of releasing whole seasons at a time), binge watching can make the show seem a little repetitive, while there are minor tweaks to the course over the course of the episodes there are no big changes episode to episode, including the finale (a problem that Ninja Warrior alleviated by having longer seasons).
I hope to see a second season of Ultimate Beastmaster as I like these kind of shows so here is hoping that it makes Rocky a boat load of cash!