‘Buddy Games’: Josh Duhamel Talks Getting Muddy & Testing Friendships

“It’s a big adult summer camp, and they went all in,” Josh Duhamel says of the contestants on the new CBS game show he hosts.

Buddy Games, inspired by Duhamel’s real-life tradition, pits six teams of four friends against each other in a series of competitions and eliminations to see which bonds can withstand the heat. The last buddy team standing will be crowned champion and take home a cash prize and the coveted Buddy Games trophy.

“Everybody was so gung ho to just do all the things and just let go of their adulthood for a little bit and their jobs and their husbands and wives, their kids and all the stuff that they do, and they got to go be basically kids again at a big summer camp,” Duhamel adds. “That was really fun to watch.”

Below, Duhamel introduces Buddy Games.

Your real-life tradition inspires this show with your friends. How did that grow into what this show is?

Josh Duhamel: Well, we always thought that this could make a fun show for the masses just because we already knew people did versions of this everywhere, and I just felt like what a fun idea to have people compete with their oldest friends as a group. I hadn’t seen anything like that before. We’ve seen similar versions with other shows doing some of these games and stuff, but even our games are really buddy-centric in terms of knowing which friends do what best and which ones have the strengths, which ones have the weaknesses in certain areas, and the better you know your friends, the better you’ll probably compete. That turned out to be the truth in this show.

How would you and your friends do on this show with these exact scenarios and having to send one of the team home?

I think we would do pretty well. Some of us have known each other since kindergarten, so we go way back. But some of it has to do with the luck of the draw. Some of it is human error, unforced errors. There are lots of things that can happen, but I think that we would do pretty well.

Robert Voets/CBS

Speaking of the teams having to send one of their own home, talk about how that came about because that is a real test of these friendships.

That was CBS’ idea, and I loved it because we didn’t want them to be too comfortable all the time. We wanted there to be some tough decisions they had to make, and when they found out that they had to vote one of their own players off the team in order to keep going, it was pretty dramatic right off the bat, pretty emotional, but great TV. What we wanted was there to be, obviously, the friendship and the camaraderie and the brother and sisterhoods but also some conflict, and that definitely brought about some conflict for the show.

Some teams stick together, while others start showing signs of tension and splitting kind of early on. Without spoiling anything, what did you see that led to problems within the teams?

I think that some of these teams weren’t as close as other ones, and they weren’t able to resolve issues. A good example is the Pageant Queens. They hadn’t known each other that long, so it was apparent early on that there was some… I don’t know if jealousy or struggles for power within the group started to show early. Those pageant queens brought a lot of drama to the show because of that.

You talked about the buddy-centric aspect, but how else did you want these competitions to stand out?

Well, one of the things that I wanted to do early on was they had to be old, really close friends who had a lot of history together. But the other thing I wanted, and it’s the same thing we have in our group, is that we mess with each other a lot. I call my friend Bob Bobatage because, especially when I’m running the games, he’s always sabotaging something just to mess with me and he’s always playing little pranks on people. Somebody’s got a pressure situation where they gotta make a hit in wiffle ball or make a shot in basketball, or they’ll all sit on the 18th hole when we play golf and just heckle.

We wanted there to be that element because it’s funny and I guess it’s a love language for some groups of friends like it is ours. And so I wanted that sabotage to be something that happened. So we came up with the curveball, which was the opening game in each episode, which gave one team the ability to sabotage another, and that was something I thought really set the tone and ultimately affected the outcome of these games and their path to victory.

What can you preview about the final and its competitions?

All I can say is that we got really lucky with how these teams fell almost completely off and were able to fight back. Teams you think are going to be out early somehow find a way to fight back, and you’ll be surprised at who ultimately makes it to the final.

Robert Voets/CBS

You test the buddy games. Which one did you have the most fun doing, and which did you struggle with the most?

I had the most fun doing the first obstacle course when I jumped in the mud and did the giant-sized beer pong. The only problem with that was that I was caked with mud for six hours, and by the time I was done, I was like, “Oh my God, this was a bad idea. I should have cleaned off right after the thing,” but I didn’t.

The one that I probably liked the least was maybe the food when they dumped all the food on my head. It was pretty gross. It took several showers to get it all off. There’s some stuff we make these guys eat and drink that is pretty nasty. I don’t know how these people at CBS come up with this stuff, but they are really good.

What kind of competition show would you do the best in? A team one like this with your friends or The Amazing Race, or something where you go in on your own, like Survivor or The Challenge?

I guess I would say team — it’s always a lot more fun, I think, because, with our group, we would know which guys would jump in the canoe and do the best there, which guys would do the best at cornhole, the ring toss, or whatever. So that, to me, would be part of the fun is the strategizing.

Related

Get a first look at CBS' upcoming 'Buddy Games.'

What are you hoping viewers take away from this show? The camaraderie?

Yeah, it’s emotional, it’s dramatic, it’s highly competitive, it’s wild, and it’s really funny. People are going to like different things for different reasons on this show, and I think why it’s going to be so relatable is they’re going to see themselves in these groups of friends. I think it was surprisingly emotional. I knew it would get dramatic, but I didn’t think it would get as heated as it does at times.

And one thing that surprised me also was that you put a group of people in a house, a group of grownups of 18 or 24 people, you take away the phones and the TVs and any sort of access to the outer world, and we’re talking about people from all different walks of life… We had Team Pride from Oregon — gay, lesbian, trans. We had a group of Black cops from Chicago. We had some cowboys from Oklahoma, [and] roller derby girls from California. They were all very different and came from different backgrounds, but the amount of love these guys showed each other was kind of awesome. I was expecting a lot more fireworks within the house, with people not getting along or fighting. But it was kind of cool to see how much these guys all got along and still to this day keep in touch and go fly to each other’s cities and go hang out. So that, to me, was really kind of a sweet story.

Buddy Games, Series Premiere, Thursday, September 14, 9/7c, CBS