‘Contender’-loving care: Producer Adam Briles goes behind the scenes on the 20th anniversary

The Contender debuted on NBC on March 7, 2005. This article is part of a monthly series throughout 2025 — the 20th anniversary year — catching up with alumni of the show.

Previous profiles in this series: Sergio Mora, Tarick Salmaci.

The first episode of “The Contender” aired exactly 20 years ago today, on March 7, 2005. The second episode aired three days later, on March 10, 2005. And the third aired three days after that, on March 13, 2005.

That’s three episodes in six days, all in different time slots: Monday at 9:30 p.m. (actually, more like 9:36 due to NBC’s spill-over scheduling strategy in effect at the time with lead-in “Fear Factor”), Thursday at 10, and Sunday at 8.

Nowadays, in the streaming era, “time slots” barely exist. But in 2005, when the most popular shows were all on network TV (the top seven for the 2004-05 TV season were “CSI,” “American Idol,” “Desperate Housewives,” “CSI: Miami,” “Without a Trace,” “Survivor,” and “Grey’s Anatomy”) and viewers knew they could watch their favorite show at a specific time on a specific night of the week, what NBC did to “The Contender” amounted to programming malpractice.

That certainly wasn’t the only factor in preventing what was at the time the most expensive reality show ever produced from succeeding in the ratings. But it was absolutely a misfire that made it harder for the show to find and build an audience. And, wouldn’t you know, before the first season was even over, NBC announced that “The Contender” wouldn’t be renewed for a second season on the network.

According to Nielsen ratings, the show attracted 8.1 million households for its debut, 7.97 million for its live finale, and 6.2 million on average. In 2025, those numbers would qualify it as a smash hit. In 2005, they very much did not.

Still, ratings juggernaut or not, the people who worked behind the scenes on “The Contender” were extremely proud of what they created — and Supervising Producer Adam Briles remains so 20 years later.

“We loved it, and people watching loved it. It got all this critical acclaim. The only shade that it was getting came from hardcore boxing fans who hated that we were editing the fights because they were sure that we were covering up some conspiracy,” Briles, now 60, told Boxing Scene. He added, referencing Mark Burnett, the show’s creator: “It was always a personal favorite of Mark’s. He loved that show.”

Burnett had been the king of reality TV ever since he brought reality-competition trailblazer “Survivor” to CBS five years earlier. Briles worked with Burnett as a “Survivor” producer for seven of the first eight seasons between 2000 and 2004 (he missed one season to instead work on — brace yourself for a title you haven’t thought of in a couple of decades — “Joe Millionaire”), and Burnett offered him the opportunity in ’04 to help helm this new boxing-themed reality show he was cooking up.

“What was fascinating to me about this show,” Briles said, “was that this was not 16 people who just got lucky to get on a game show on a beach. These were professional athletes who were really talented at what they did. There was real merit to why they were there. And that’s not any shade on ‘Survivor.’ But after four years of doing ‘Survivor,’ I really appreciated having a new creative challenge and being able to tell these stories and dig into people who had all their chips on this number — meaning, their careers, their futures were on the line on ‘The Contender.’

“And on top of that, it was a fascinating social experiment to take lone-wolf athletes and have them living together, training together. They couldn’t get away from each other and yet they were on a collision course. How do you manage that, as a boxer? Do you keep your cards close to the vest? Do you try to be intimidating?”

Finding the right fighters to answer those questions was an intense process — and an expensive one, Briles noted: “We spent a million dollars casting Season One.”

They also spared no expense on the co-hosts: International Boxing Hall of Famers (in two very different categories) Sylvester Stallone and Sugar Ray Leonard. Briles was one of three people who effectively functioned as show-runners — the others were Bruce Beresford-Redman and Lisa Hennessy — and managing the various on-screen personalities largely fell on him.

Twenty years on from the show, Briles is willing to peel back the curtain on working with those hosts.

“Ray was an absolute joy. He’s just a sweet human,” Briles said. “But Sly — Sly was in a weird place in his life. He was going through a slower time in his career as an actor, and he was worried that maybe he had made a career suicide decision by agreeing to do a reality show. He was nervous, and that made him difficult to work with, from a producer’s standpoint.

“We’d be shooting something interesting, and Sly would just walk into the scene, wanting to hang out with the guys and bullshit with them, which was great. But I asked him several times, if you want to come in, just please get someone on the walkie to me and we’ll find the best time for you to come in and interact with the guys, but I don't want you to crash something that I'm in the middle of. He would get furious with me over things like that. It was really rough sometimes.

“But once he started seeing cuts of the show that we were editing together, he loved what he saw and he totally threw his arms around it and he wasn’t so nervous anymore. He really came around and he calmed down, and he was even having people over to his house and giving them advance screenings of episodes. He was really proud of the show and he was happy that he was doing it, and he became much easier to work with.

“And the truth is that, as difficult as he made producing the show at times, he was awesome on it. The show would not have been the same without him.”

With names like Stallone, Leonard, and Burnett attached, there was a bidding war between networks before filming on “The Contender” began. NBC won, obviously. FOX was among the channels that wanted the show and didn’t get it. But FOX didn’t take the “L” and move on. Instead, the network countered with its own boxing reality show — “The Next Great Champ,” hosted by Oscar De La Hoya — and rushed it to air ahead of “The Contender.”

And, much like the Week One scheduling on NBC, that turned out to be a devastating blow to “The Contender’s” hopes for big ratings.

“We were certainly not happy about the FOX show, but the one thing that we just prayed to god was is that it wasn’t terrible, because we didn't want it to leave a stench in the air for us,” Briles recalled. “That was the worst-case scenario for us, that they do a terrible job with it. We were about midway through our shoot when ‘The Next Great Champ’ hit the air. And we all convened, all of us producers, in our green room to watch the show and take notes. And it was dead silent through the whole thing. At the end, we all just went, ‘Oh no, that was awful on every level.’

“That was the worst thing that could happen to us. We were actually rooting for it to be good and not leave a fart in the elevator for our concept, but that was exactly what happened.”

It was especially disappointing to Briles that these various external factors limited the audience for the premiere episode, because to his eyes, that one had played out better than any of them could have scripted.

For those whose memories are a little fuzzy 20 years on: In the first episode, lightly regarded Alfonso Gomez called out the preseason favorite, Peter Manfredo, and effectively brought the Rocky Balboa-Apollo Creed scenario to life, kicking off the series with a massive upset. It captured every emotion the producers could have hoped for — the thrill of a career-defining victory for Gomez, the heartbreak of a seemingly career-derailing defeat for Manfredo.

Briles and his crew were worried, once the match was set, that it would be an absolute squash in Manfredo’s favor and a painfully flat way to start the series.

Instead, Briles said, “We caught lightning in a bottle.”

But, again, the quality of the product could only take it so far. “The Contender” needed to find its audience, and for a show to be a true hit by 2005 prime-time network standards, it needed a large female audience to get there. On the surface, a show centered around boxing is bound to skew heavily male. So Briles and his fellow producers had to brainstorm ways to make the show tug on heartstrings — to make sure the personal stories and struggles were as prominent as the pugilistic plotlines.

Hence the decision to bring in family members — wives, kids, parents — put them up in rental houses near the set in Pasadena, and send the boxers scheduled to fight on that episode to see them. There are some who will tell you that the moment toward the end of the original “Rocky” in which Rocky tells Adrian that he just wants to go the distance is the highlight of the movie. And there are “Contender” viewers who will tell you Manfredo spending time with his daughter, Ishe Smith having a heart-to-heart with his wife, Sergio Mora crying about his mom, that those intimate scenes are the ones that made the show work.

“We started out way skewed male and we actually got all the way to a 52% percent female audience by the end of that series,” Briles noted. “After one or two episodes, I knew that we had a great show on our hands. I was never sure if it was going to work on NBC, in terms of the ratings we needed. But, at least creatively, we were all feeling good about the product.”

When fight nights rolled around, Briles experienced something he hadn’t anticipated: an anxiety over the fact that he’d developed affection for nearly all the boxers and didn’t want to see either of the men in the ring on a given night lose.

Briles developed a particularly tight bond with eventual champion Mora. It started with a scene where Ray Leonard was struggling to get through a pep talk of sorts for the entire cast of competitors, and Mora and Smith got caught up in a giggling fit in the back of the room and were making it worse for Leonard and the entire crew. So Briles got in their faces and chewed them out with an intense, furious whisper.

The next day, Mora and Briles had a long, heartfelt talk, and by the end of it, Briles felt bad about the degree to which he’d dressed Sergio down, and extended an olive branch in the form of cookies (knowing Mora was not cutting weight at the time). They’ve been close ever since.

Briles continues to work as an executive producer of documentary-style series — in recent years, his main project has been a YouTube original on solar-powered vehicle racers called “Light Speed.”

Twenty years ago, though, it would have been his wish to work on more seasons of “The Contender.” He says despite the disappointing ratings, NBC showed interest in airing a second season — if Burnett would renegotiate deal points, which, for the first season, were far more favorable to the show’s creator than to the network. But Burnett, riding high with various hit shows on multiple networks, didn’t want to set the precedent of giving back points.

HBO showed interest, Briles said, and he would have loved to have produced a second season there, free from network standards and shackles. But Burnett instead took the show to ESPN, with a massively reduced budget, and a greater emphasis on the sport as opposed to the storytelling, making Briles’ character-focused skills somewhat expendable and his salary somewhat unaffordable.

There was even a brief moment after the first season ended when an international version hosted by Stallone was potentially on the table, but that didn’t pan out.

So by 2006, Briles was on to other things. He only came back to “The Contender” when the fifth (and final, at least for now) season came around in 2018, airing on Epix with Andre Ward as host. Briles was there in a limited capacity, as a consultant, and enjoyed the opportunity to revisit the show. But the experience didn’t compare with his first time around.

“The first season, we just had so many things working for us,” he reflected. “We had so many likable characters, characters with depth, plus we had a villain or two. It was just a really great blend of guys we had on that first season. A bigger audience would have been nice, but we couldn’t have hoped for much more in terms of what we gave our audience.”

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.