J.D. Roth is a veteran of the television industry having burst onto the scene by hosting the late 80’s kids game show Fun House to later producing shows like The Biggest Loser and Beauty and the Geek. One of his many shows, Endurance is being reimagined and reincarnated as HBO Max’s new reality-competition series Karma premiering on the streaming service Thursday, June 18th.
The show takes 18 teenagers and puts them in a remote forest where they will compete in various challenges in order to become the Karma champions. The show came about during a trip Roth took with his oldest son.
“Where Karma really came from was, my son graduated high school and he and I never been on a vacation of any kind alone, just a guy trip just him and I, you know we travel as a family all four of us always and I wanted to go with before he went on his journey to college. I told him he could go anywhere in the world ‘Where do you want to go?’ he looked at the map and we looked at from London to Dubai to islands and in the end, he chose Thailand, and when we went to Thailand, I went to really clear my head with him and be in the moment and have this great final hurrah before he packed a bag and went off to college and everywhere we went in Thailand we kept seeing the same imagery over and over again from the Buddist flag with is very circular ‘Well gosh, what does that mean?’ you ask the locals ‘Oh well, what goes around comes around, that’s what we believe!’ you know and talking to Buddist monks and going to those ceremonies and going to the temples you talk to people and what do they always say? ‘The energy you put out in the world is the energy you get back’ and this theme of karma just kept coming up over and over and over and over and I wrote it down in my little nightstand at the hotel, you have that little pad of paper, I just kept doodling the word karma and my son said ‘Hey Dad, why do you keep writing karma over and over again?’ and we started talking about the themes of the people in Thailand and the themes of a cultural history that goes back and that it’s not just a word, it’s not just the title of a show, it’s a belief system you know and that belief system has such power to it and such gravitas and why is that?”
Keen fans of Endurance may remember that the idea of karma played a role in the show’s final season, but when asked about props he’s kept from shows like Endurance, Roth says that the link didn’t dawn on him until later.
“Interestingly enough I went back after we sold the show and we started making it, you know, I was trying to refine the format and perfect it and was looking at all the things I had from Endurance, and there was the Karma piece, and it was, for that moment, that I made the connection for the first time that ‘Oh my god! That’s right! We had a Karma piece in Endurance!’ That was literally the first time I made the connection back to one of the [pieces] of Endurance and the title of the new show and it was kind of a cool moment for me because it happened naturally. It wasn’t one of those things where I was trying to make a connection.”
Karma premieres on HBO Max Thursday, June 18th.
Listen to the full conversation with J.D. Roth in the player below
