The Artistic Integrity of Jackass: The Series Has Been Restored
That is kind of what happened, though.
Say what you want about Johnny Knoxville and the rest of the Jackass crew: That they’re crude, that they’re juvenile, that they’ve made careers out of pulling down their pants on national TV (and in five feature films, thank you very much). But one thing you can never say is that they don’t care about the integrity of their creation.
This was recently proven on the streaming service Paramount+, where at the end of 2025 all three seasons of the original Jackass TV series were removed and replaced with a message: “Warning: Per me, the jackass tv shows have been temporarily taken down from Paramount+ to restore them to the way they originally aired. That way, you and your dumb little buddies can watch them as they were presented 25 fucking years ago. So, hold tight and the shows will be right back, as painful and dumb as you remember them. Wahoo and sincerely, Johnny Knoxville.”
Now they’re back, and the dignity of the show has been restored. (The performers will never regain theirs, but they knew that when they signed up.) As Knoxville tells Variety in a statement, over the past couple of decades, “the television episodes had been re-edited, re-sequenced, and re-scored to the point they were unrecognizable,” which he “[found] out the hard way last year when attempting to watch them.” The new versions, which debuted on the platform this week, have been fixed, and are exactly the same as what aired on MTV between 2000 and 2002.
A Jackass digital restoration has been a long time coming — even the show’s original DVD release from the mid-’00s reshuffled the pranks into a different running order, and the episodes have gotten even more garbled since making the transition to streaming. VHS bootlegs taped from the original MTV airings of the show still circulate among Jackass purists, and multiple fan edits restoring the original music cues and original sequencing of the TV series currently exist online.
Noble endeavors all, but unnecessary now that Knoxville has convinced Paramount to “[give] us the $$ to restore the shows to how they initially aired in the first place,” as he says in his statement. And bless him for it. Now we can all rest easy, knowing that we are watching “The Beekini” the way it was meant to be seen.
It should go without saying, but don’t try this at home. But now, you can watch it — and the rest of the Jackass series — in all its original glory in the safety of your home.
