What Would Ryan Lochte Do? Get canceled after one season, apparently!
This is probably for the best: Now that What Would Ryan Lochte Do? has been canceled, the Olympic swimmer can go back to doing what he does best… And we don’t have to pretend the show is amusing.
TVLine reported E! pulled the plug on WWRLD? after one season because of low ratings: The show premiered to an underwhelming 800,000 last April. Worse yet, only 300,000 watched the season (/series) finale.
It’s easy to see why E! thought the show was a good idea: Ryan was riding a big wave of publicity after winning multiple medals at the 2012 Olympics. He’s also quite easy on the eyes. Unfortunately, Ryan lacks finesse (or a basic grasp) of the English language.
Before the show premiered, he infamously gave a painfully confusing interview to a Philadelphia news station.
“Seriously, how are they gonna get enough material?,” one of the anchors asked after he managed to stop laughing.
When WWRLD? premiered that weekend, it was evident that was a real problem for producers.
“Basically, the show is a half hour of gratuitous shirtless Speedo shots, punctuated by horrifying moments of excruciating secondhand embarrassment. Lochte isn’t smart enough to be embarrassed by his own antics, so E! gave him a television show so that America could be embarrassed for him,” Carina Adly MacKenzie wrote for Zap 2 It. “He doesn’t even know how many Olympic medals he’s won. For the record, it’s eleven. It’s not that high a number to count to.”
Farewell, Ryan! See you at the 2016 Olympics…