The seventeenth season of American Ninja Warrior (ANW)—NBC’s bizarre, mawkish, overproduced train in gymnastics-meets-parkour—is wrapping up, prompting sorrow in these components. My youngsters and I are unhappy to bid so lengthy to its ludicrous personalities, self-referential storylines, and affably cornball hosts (former NFL baller Akbar Gbaja-Biamila and comic/M.D. Matt Iseman) till 2026.

Should you haven’t seen the present (and there’s a great opportunity you haven’t, contemplating its Monday-night airings this summer time drew about 2.5 million viewers an episode), it incorporates a discipline of rivals battling to finish a sequence of obstacles suspended over large tubs of water. Because the season progresses, the programs get extra daunting and the athleticism ever extra exceptional. The “ninjas” are likely to favor t-shirts embossed with tacky nicknames (“Flyboy,” “Flex,” “The Beast,” “The Island Ninja”), and the entire thing performs out on a rickety-looking set constructed on a Vegas facet avenue, with the Strip at all times looming within the background.

Sounds ridiculous, proper? However damned if I don’t love watching it with my boys. Extra tellingly, it’s the uncommon present that I be ok with watching with them. It’s two hours of fastidiously packaged pluck, grit, and group, dotted with the type of soft-focus mini-features that the Olympics made well-known again within the day. Among the profiles are eye-rolling (the cowboy who trains on bales of hay), however a stunning variety of them join with even a callous SOB like me. Coronary heart assault victims. Most cancers survivors. Teenagers with extreme trauma. Mother and father who’ve misplaced youngsters. Rivals who’ve spent years battling again from harm. It’s a celebration of perseverance and coronary heart.

After all, ANW is manipulative. I’m positive loads of the cheering is staged. I can’t presumably imagine that Iseman or Gbaja-Biamila are as good-natured, sq., and unfailingly enthusiastic as they arrive throughout. We’re fed a gentle stream of gracious losers, with teary-eyed rivals accepting hugs and expressing gratitude. Authenticity isn’t the purpose. It’s leisure. And I’m undecided that’s such a nasty factor.

In any case, fashionable tradition as we speak exposes our children to far an excessive amount of authentically dangerous conduct up shut. Social media is crammed with pictures of genuine meanness and stupidity. Influencers work laborious to infuse their wealth porn and self-promotion with fake authenticity. A professional-sports broadcast options fixed low-level chatter about “actual” stuff like contract negotiations, wage caps, trades, and allegations of sexual assault. And streaming networks are overstuffed with “actuality” reveals that avidly market their catfights, informal hook-ups, grievances, and gratuitous nastiness. Maybe authenticity is overrated. A jerk who celebrates their jerkiness seems to be a awful position mannequin. Who’d-a thunk it?

This all makes ANW’s chaste, family-friendly amateurism a welcome oasis. The present doesn’t do excuses, grievance, or victimhood. It boasts an astonishing stew by way of age, area, avocation, race, ethnicity, and intercourse. My youngsters particularly dig watching 15- and 16-year-olds dusting the grown-ups. The opposite week, they had been leaping off the sofa when 4’11” Jason Behrends certified for the finals and when a geeky 19-year-old electrician with a nasty haircut and outsized glasses torched the course. It’s a terrific illustration of the issues with stereotyping and assuming athletes or rivals look a sure method. The celebs embody some severe six-packs but additionally various dad bods and scrawny teenagers.

There aren’t many locations on this land the place you see hen farmers, academics, faculty gymnasts, shipbuilders, fight veterans, stuntwomen, motivational audio system, firemen, and introverted excessive schoolers mingling, competing, and cheering each other’s successes. The ambiance is all friendship and boisterous assist. Rivals deliver spouses, youngsters, and fogeys. College students, colleagues, and prolonged household are beamed in from afar.

ANW looks like an endorsement of old-school amateurism—one thing that’s more durable and more durable to seek out in an period when journey leagues and participation charges are devouring youth sports activities, the Olympics are large trade, and the NCAA has morphed into one other big-dollar skilled league.

ANW gives one thing purer. Earlier this season, a 50-year-old man named Jimmy Choi, who’s had Parkinson’s since his 20s, took on the course and offered probably the most teachable moments I’ve ever seen on display screen. He made it previous the primary impediment and located the energy to grasp the course’s “Lunatic Ledges,” swinging his method throughout a distance of thirty toes or extra. Then, regardless of his affliction from a illness that’s stolen his stability, he raced throughout 5 rolling logs—an illustration of grit that may’t be manufactured. Jimmy failed on the fourth impediment, however by then, my household was hoarse from cheering on a middle-aged man for getting partway by a televised impediment course. (Yep, that’s a sentence I by no means thought I’d write.) Afterwards, we talked about Jimmy’s self-discipline, the grace with which he mentioned his illness, and why it’s the hassle, not the outcome, that issues.

Watching Iseman and Gbaja-Biamila have a good time Choi, I spotted I don’t care whether or not their reactions are staged. What I care about is the mannequin of sportsmanship and decency my youngsters are seeing. No excuses get made. Each effort is honored. Ripped gymnasts and painfully awkward teenagers get handled with equal respect. There’s no booing, simply loads of supportive indicators and inspiring chants. In an period marked by loneliness, nervousness, and alienation, I can’t assist however suppose that ninja classes could also be simply what we’d like.

Frederick Hess is an govt editor of Training Subsequent and the creator of the weblog “Previous Faculty with Rick Hess.”