TV critics, FCC commissioners, and homeless people eating moldy pudding out of a dumpster have all unanimously described the latest unaired episode of Fear Factor as “the most disgusting thing ever,” with the FCC commissioner adding, “and this is including that one time I accidentally licked a cat’s anal glands.” But what could possibly provoke such disgust and outrage for a TV show that makes eating testicles seem like a familiar routine on a normal Tuesday?

As it turns out, NBC declined to air the latest episode of Fear Factor because contestants were made to do something so horribly disgusting that executives weren’t sure the episode wouldn’t cause New York to be swept out to sea in a stream of mass projectile vomit. In the unaired Fear Factor episode, contestants were made to do something far worse than eat worms dipped into vats of shit; they were made to sit through an entire episode of Fear Factor.

At first, the contestants hesitated. One contestant’s finger hovered over and tentatively pressed the “play” button, but as soon as the first chords of the Fear Factor theme song were sounded, the contestant quickly retched, vomiting up the various insects and genitalia he had devoured in previous rounds, and refused to continue.

“You can make me eat worms. And you can make me get into a vat full of cockroaches. And you can even connect a tube from my mouth to my ass so that I shit into my mouth and then eat my shit and poop out my shit in a never-ending cycle of rebirth. But this is too far,” said one of the contestants after host Joe Rogan told (or rather yelled, owing to a genetic disorder in which he’s unable to control the volume of his voice) the contestant he’d have to watch an entire episode of Fear Factor in order to win. “You have to understand, Joe,” continued the contestant, tears streaming down his face in sadness or perhaps as a result of the few seconds of Fear Factor he had watched, “I wouldn’t be able to look my children in the face if I went through with this. I would lose my dignity if I did this.” He wiped some stray giant Amazonian cockroach testicle pieces from the corner of his mouth. “And if there’s one thing I can’t give up, it’s my dignity.” He then bowed his head and walked off stage, carefully stepping around the buckets full of rotten fish heads as he did so.

As is customary, Rogan then offered the remaining contestants vast sums of unattainable wealth if they would only defile themselves in an unimaginable way. But still, none would agree to lower themselves to such a degree that they’d watch an entire episode of Fear Factor. Joe Rogan himself, who suffers from a genetic disorder making him unable to feel pain or emotion, even began to retch as he exhorted the contestants in an increasingly wavering voice to please watch the episode of Fear Factor. It is rumored that Rogan is the only person capable of hosting the full duration of the show because of his excessive cannabis use that deadens his senses and his daily forays into a sensory deprivation tank wherein he curls up into a fetal position for hours and tries his best to burn away the memories of his hosting duties.

In general, Fear Factor justifies its extreme and disgusting practices by citing obscure cultures in which these activities are normalized. If the task is to eat frog ovaries, producers will point out that the ancient Mayans frequently dined upon frog ovaries as a precious delicacy when they weren’t cutting out each other’s hearts. If the task is to drink fermented yak piss, the producers will point to the nearly vanished tribe of Yitsuishi now living in a small region in Brazil and suffering from bacterial infections and near-extinction no doubt caused by their tradition of drinking fermented yak piss. However, the producers could find no cultures that would watch an entire episode of Fear Factor. Even the brave Yitsuishi, induced into a feverish, infection-induced trance of religious fervor from consumption of yak urine, could not be coerced into watching an episode, choosing instead to flay themselves with whips and castrate themselves with primitive instruments of flint. And in American culture, Fear Factor is never watched all the way through. It survives only in short clips on Youtube, as even strong-willed Americans desensitized to reality television schlock can only handle this type of thing in small bits and pieces.

Naturally, this is not the first time Fear Factor has courted controversy. The last time, it was in the news because NBC refused to air an episode in which a contestant drank donkey semen. Prior to that, there was a bit of a dust-up over an episode in which white supremacists were made to touch the soft, ebony skin of a real-life black person. And before that there were the episodes in which contestants were forced to read War and Peace rendered entirely in Comic Sans and Papyrus fonts, to eat food from Hooters without the pleasant and palate-distracting presence of large orbs of female secondary sexual characteristics, and to spend over 16 minutes in the presence of Newt Gingrich.

Aside from the controversies generated by individual episodes, Fear Factor itself, as a show, has also been heralded as one of (possibly two of) the signs of the Apocalypse and as the progenitor of today’s ubiquitous and much-maligned “reality television.” Prior to Fear Factor’s emergence, television rarely featured the consumption of any genitals at all, and people making out with large, rainforest-dwelling insects was something you could find only on pay-per-view or in David Lynch films, if at all. Now, of course, that TV executives have realized the relative inexpensiveness of producing a show in which people are made to eat dicks, such sights are common fare on primetime TV. A typical evening on NBC could now easily be mistaken for a poorly designed community college course in animal husbandry, Sex Ed., and the history of the city of Hiroshima from 1945-1949 somehow all intertwined into a mass of unintelligible schlock, with Joe Rogan (a man with a rare genetic disorder that causes him to host Fear Factor) as the extremely loud professor.

When questioned by reporters, an NBC executive reportedly said, “At the present moment we have no plans to air the episode of Fear Factor in which contestants watched Fear Factor, on our lawyers’ advice.” He paused. “The episode with the donkey semen, however, is still a possibility, pending the results of the paternity test.”