The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV: Best and Worst of the Series, part 2

Welcome, all you fine, discerning readers, to another wistful look back upon The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV. Coming up in our second and final installment, awards for Best Season, Worst Season, The Ken Shamrock Memorial Award for Exceptionally Absurd Characterization, and more...

Best Season

Guys, Team Nogueira vs. Team Mir was pretty excellent. Following on the heels of Team Hughes vs. Team Serra and Team Rampage vs. Team Forrest, both of which featured unremarkable casts and hinged almost entirely on the coaches' dynamic, Season 8 of The Ultimate Fighter was a breath of fresh air.

Led by well-intentioned coaches who weren't stuck there just to fill the spotlight (hello, Team Lesnar vs. Team Dos Santos) it featured a respectable cast that, on the light-heavyweight end of things, ended up adding a fair bit of heft to the UFC talent pool. And while only two of the show's lightweights have since found any purchase in the UFC, the show's smaller competitors did offer a nice thread of drama, with general loudmouth and noted disaster Junie Browning finally getting his comeuppance in the show's final episode, via D'Arce choke from Efrain Escudero. Add to this the fact that nearly all of the fights featured on the show finished by TKO or submission, and that once in a while some old man named Stankie managed to sneak onto the set to convey strange, hobo wisdom to the contestants, and you have a winning season.

The Ken Shamrock Award for Exceptionally Absurd Characterization

Everyone knows that "reality TV" is a bit of a misnomer. The facts of a matter take a back seat to drama, and show producers often see fit to bend the truth and alter the sequence of events in order to more completely make a fool out of somebody. Let us honor the sorriest of these hapless goofs: Gabe Ruediger and Noah Inhofer.

Gabe Ruediger was portrayed as eating all manner of baked goods even as he infamously struggled (and failed) to make weight. As Ruediger explained after the show, though, scenes of him beasting on ice cream cake took place well before he began struggling with the cut. And while we could debate the wisdom of beasting at any point in time on any amount of ice cream cake when you're on a show whose theme song challenges you to "bear witness to the fitness," I think we can agree that that season's producers really went the extra mile in painting Ruediger as a grinning, cake-crazed madman.

Noah Inhofer left the show after receiving a distressing letter from his girlfriend. To reiterate, he left a show which stresses no contact with the outside world, be it by email, phone call, or whatever, after receiving a letter. Uh, why did he get that letter? The only conclusion left to make is that Chuck Liddell was afraid that Inhofer would grow to be too much of a challenge at light-heavyweight and asked Dana White to find a way to eliminate him from the show.

After the jump, "Worst Season" and "Sad and Awkward: The Award"

Worst Season

Season 13's Team Lesnar vs. Team Dos Santos was just a sad pile of disappointment and confusion, starting with the premise that a pair of massive heavyweights would be the best fit to coach a cast of 155-pound fighters. Given the unremarkable cast of lightweights assembled, the producers were clearly counting on Brock Lesnar to be the center of the show, but what we got was less "Furious Dynamo Brock Lesnar" and more "Can't-You-See-I've-Had-a-Long-Day-at-Work-Tired-Angry-Dad-Brock-Lesnar." With Lesnar's spirit off somewhere in the mountains slaying saber-toothed tigers, we were left with the grinning, vaguely coherent Dos Santos, whose big move that season was to fire coach Lew Polley from his staff for reasons that I'm still not entirely clear on (see: vaguely coherent). To top it all off, the fight between Lesnar and Dos Santos never happened. Terrible.

Sad and Awkward: The Award

"You who don't want nothing to do with Jens Pulver, raise your hand."

It's been three or four times that I've watched this sorry scene, where B.J. Penn puts the question to the Season 6 contestants during team picks, and it's always a colossal bummer. Watching Jens Pulver look over all those raised arms with a distant, disbelieving smile has to be one of the saddest moments from the series' run. That Pulver went on to prove himself a far more dedicated coach makes things all the more obscene.

Honorable mentions: the sight of Jason Thacker standing before a seated Randy Couture, sniffling and teary-eyed as he received the news that he was being cut from the show because their team, like, lost an obstacle course race or didn't win a hardboiled-egg-eating contest. There's also Ken Shamrock's surprise birthday party from the third season. I guess his wife wasn't given the memo that Shamrock's whole team hated his guts. Cue the saddest, most awkward singing of the birthday song I've ever seen on TV (and I've seen A LOT).