Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Prank Panel’ on ABC, Where Johnny Knoxville, Eric André, and Gabourey Sidibe Help Regular Folks Realize Their Gag Dreams

Johnny Knoxville, Eric André, and Gabourey Sidibe are your ringleaders for The Prank Panel (ABC), where everyday people pitch the trio on their intentions to stick it to a loved one with an outrageous prank concept. Panel is produced in part by Kimmelot, which, speaking of ABC, connects it to Jimmy Kimmel’s well-known yen for gaggery; after all, before he was a fixture of late night, he was a producer of the long-running puppets-and-phone calls series Crank Yankers. The Prank Panel also promises a few celebrity guests along the way. 

THE PRANK PANEL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: The prank panelists are gathering on stage. But just as Eric André is greeting Johnny Knoxville and Gabourey Sidibe at their big desk, a childhood picture of him on an adjacent shelf explodes. Pranks! They have ‘em. “I do this for a living,” André says through laughter, “and I’m the biggest mark.”

The Gist: A Jackass-style disclaimer appears at the outset of The Prank Panel, albeit with its tongue firmly in cheek. It warns that the program contains graphic vengeance, payback, and dirty tricks. And with the help of the merry pranxters on the panel, people who’ve been “bullied and bamboozled” by their family and friends will clap back with elaborately constructed gags complete with props, constructed situations, a support crew, and a mix of actors and unsuspecting randoms. But in order to get to that level, folks must appear before the panel and pitch them, Shark Tank-style, on what they have in mind. In a montage, we see Knoxville, André, and Sidibe putting people on the spot and shooting down their ideas; maybe a concept is too vague, too lame, or just not worth their time. But eventually, they encounter a guy named Alan who has a plan to prank his wife, and Knoxville takes the bait. “I will do it,” he declares. “I will do your prank.”

Alan and his wife Al-x are professional wedding officiants, so Knoxville explains that they’ve concocted a ruse where she’ll end up marrying a (fake) brother and sister. And on the day of the event, real guests and catering people mingle with ringers from the Prank Panel bullpen. There are Jen and Adam, “the bride and groom,” Renee “the wedding planner,” and angry “Aunt Cynthia,” all of whom are in on the bit and receiving direction in an earpiece from Knoxville, who with Alan alongside him is watching/orchestrating from a trailer onsite. Soon enough, the whole thing twists into absurdity. The “maid of honor” crashes through a cake table, the fake bride screeches “I get to make love to him as a wife, and not just a sister anymore!”, and a catering plant starts his arm on fire, which he plunges into the punch bowl. The cameras catch poor Al-x trying to keep her professional composure, and that’s when Knoxville cues Alan to show up in handcuffs. “You and your husband have conspired to marry a brother and sister,” says another Prank Panel plant. “These two are ‘breast friends,’ they’re ‘womb-mates.’” And Knoxville appears just as Al-x, “the ‘mark’,” seems on the verge of a complete emotional breakdown. Pranked!

And after each prank has run its course – it seems like there will be two segments per episode – the panelists appear before a studio audience, where they gather pranker and prankee on stage for a wholesome wrap-up of the gag that was. 

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Obviously, with Jackass and The Eric Andre Show, The Prank Panel has on hand a wealth of experience with silliness, absurdity, and pranking. During the big reveal for one of the segments here, the “mark” touches Knoxville’s face incredulously. “Are you real? I’m always worried you’ll die on your show.” But there is no shortage of shows that needle unsuspecting rubes, with Chad & JT Go Deep on Netflix being one recent example. 

Our Take: There’s a long media history of this kind of thing, from Allen Funt with Candid Camera and Ashton Kutcher with Punk’d all the way through to the more jarring and even more painful exploits of Johnny Knoxville and Eric André and their respective shows, and The Prank Panel includes pieces of all of it. By now, we’re familiar with the format – we’re in on the joke from the start, vicariously join the pranksters in the trailer as they monitor and conduct the action, and anticipate the moment where the whole thing pops off, the mark either whirls around in anger or bursts into tears, and the hosts leap out for the big gotcha moment. If Panel is doing anything different, it’s in its incorporation of the everyday person who originally pitched the idea. In the pilot’s fake wedding segment, Alan sits next to Knoxville in the trailer, offering commentary on his wife Al-x’s behaviors and reactions. It’s not as if a prankster pro like the Jackass veteran wouldn’t be able to orchestrate the bit on his own, but it feels like a way to include the average person in the conceit. 

It’s not clear we need that. Stuff like Jackass and The Eric Andre Show derive laughs from their utter outrageousness, outsized pranks that flirt with huge payoffs and even huger amounts of risk; Punk’d, way back when on MTV, had its celebrities down badding other celebrities to rely on as a hook. Panel, conversely, seems to stop right before anything truly unhinged happens. Is this because it’s on ABC, and includes numerous shills for Disney programming during its ad breaks? Probably. It’s almost like Knoxville and André have graduated to pedestrian mode after putting in the more elaborate or dangerous or absurd prank work to get here. Only one nut punch in the whole pilot? Come on.

Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond Knoxville’s snarkily prurient line about the initial prank, where an unwitting officiant marries a fake brother and sister in “a complete celebration of incest.”

Parting Shot: After a brief wrap-up with the participants in their final segment before the Prank Panel studio audience, Johnny Knoxville tosses his cue cards at the camera. “Alright, ABC, you can cancel us now!” 

Sleeper Star: At least in the first episode, Gabourey Sidibe takes on the role of naysayer, lobbing funny jabs at both Knoxville and Andre and always keeping the pranker hopefuls who come before their desk off balance with unexpected questions and comments. (“I don’t know if we can actually hire a shark to do this prank.”) Here’s hoping Sidibe also coordinates pranks in the field the way her co hosts are seen to do in the pilot.    

Most Pilot-y Line: “Tonight you’ll meet the brilliant pranksters who begged us to help them prank the special people in their lives. And then you’ll see how we spent tons of ABC’s money to pull off their pranks bigger, better, and stupider than they could have ever imagined. And to achieve this, all it took were two nimrods” – here, Johnny Knoxville gestures to himself and André – “and one brilliant Academy Award nominee.” 

Our Call: Maybe STREAM IT as summertime waiting room programming. Johnny Knoxville, Eric André, and Gabourey Sidibe have a nice rapport, The Prank Panel sets off its segments in the field with plenty of prep and glee, and the big reveals – “Hey, we pranked you!” – are mostly worth the wait. But the general wholesomeness of the show undercuts the more crazed stunts that multiple seasons of shows like Jackass have conditioned us to expect from this kind of prank-gram.  

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges