A Very Special Episode A single television episode can exemplify the spirit of its time. A Very Special Episode presents The A.V. Club's survey of TV at its most distinctive.

In 1987, when the NFL players went on strike, Dan Clark briefly became a Los Angeles Ram, following through on a football dream that had carried him through college ball and the European pro leagues. The job didn't last, but roughly a year later Clark was back on a football field, as a featured extra on the HBO series 1st & Ten. Not long after that, he got an agent, Joe Kolkowitz, who specialized in finding bit parts for jocks and hunks. After a few months of making pennies as background beefcake on various TV shows, Clark was about to quit when he answered a casting-call ad in Backstage West, looking for athletes to take part in a new game show shooting at Universal Studios in Hollywood. That's how Dan Clark became "Nitro"—one of the first American Gladiators.

The concept behind American Gladiators was simple: Take the big bodies, colorful characters, and hard hits of professional wrestling, but put them into an actual competition. The contestants—also pre-selected for their physical fitness—competed in a series of challenges against the show's cast of flashily attired, bulked-up Gladiators, hoping to score more points than opponents playing the same games against the same crew. Contestants and gladiators squared off in an oversized, futuristic arena, where they tried to knock each other down in elaborate obstacle courses. On TV this played a lot like the ABC's 1970s "junk sports" series Superstars, crossed with Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Clark and the other Gladiators shot 13 first-season episodes in 1989, before anyone on the production team really knew whether this concept would work on TV. According to Clark's memoir Gladiator: A True Story Of 'Roids, Rage, And Redemption—and in the commentary track by Clark, Raye "Zap" Hollitt, and Jim "Laser" Starr on Shout! Factory's American Gladiators: The Battle Begins DVD set—at first they didn't play whole matches straight through. Instead, they taped all the footage they needed from each event, sometimes spending hours doing them over and over while waiting out the technical snafus common to a fledgling television production.

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Beyond the physical exhaustion of the Gladiators—who had to endure a procession of fresh contestants—the main problem with this setup was that the studio audience was drawn from tourists who'd paid good money to come to Universal Studios and then found themselves stuck at a taping of a show they didn't know, watching a game that didn't make any sense. (At a certain point, the staff stopped trying to fill all the seats and started painting faces on plywood to fool the camera.) In the conception stage, American Gladiators was much more fantastical, with the Gladiators themselves drawn as full-on, cartoony "characters," and the arena presented as some kind of extra-dimensional realm, complete with an ominous hooded referee. The live audience found it all confusing.

But as the producers started shaping the footage, they discovered that the tournament itself was exciting, even without all the extra trappings. Beginning with the second half of season one—which featured an entirely new set of contestants—American Gladiators started playing up the sports angle and focusing less on the sword-and-sorcery. By the time the show was ready to start shooting the second half of its first season, a lot of the kinks had been ironed out and the weaker elements eliminated. All of which means that the mid-season "recap" show—a sort of greatest hits from the first tournament—stands now as a document of American Gladiators in its nascent form, before anyone involved knew that they were making one of the biggest syndicated TV hits of the 1990s.

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One indicator that this recap's a relic is the presence of Joe Theismann, who was the play-by-play man and announcer for the first half of the season, before his color commentator Mike Adamle took over. In the DVD commentary, the Gladiators don't have much to say about Theismann—it's a pointed "no comment" all around—but they love Adamle, whom Nitro calls not just the voice but "the conscience" of the show. That dynamic is evident even here in Theismann's final American Gladiators appearance, where he talks about personalities and body-slams while Adamle evaluates the contestants' technique and guts. Hailing the tournament's first champions, Adamle describes them as being Walter Mitty-like: just everyday weekend warriors, treating a made-up TV competition as though it were the Super Bowl.

This retrospective proceeds