Science Meets Destruction in Never Ever Do This at Home

Credit: Discovery

Never Ever Do This at Home hosts Hosts Norm Sousa and Teddy Wilson

Discovery’s Never Ever Do This at Home does Mythbuster-style experiments without the qualified professionals

From MacGyver to Jackass, numerous TV series over the years have attracted viewers by depicting dangerous, death-defying stunts.

Whether these are real or faked for TV, the people behind the shows protect themselves from lawsuits in case some dimwitted viewer with more free time than common sense attempts to recreate one of the stunts with some sort of disclaimer, typically some variation on the old trope, “Kids, don’t try this at home!” 

This advice is completely ignored in Never Ever Do This at Home, a new Discovery Channel series that does the exact opposite, combining science, comedy and high explosives to test the limits of how much abuse the typical home can withstand. 

Hosts Teddy Wilson (the Space channel’s InnerSPACE) and Norm Sousa (SketchersonsTV) attempt crazy, MythBusters-style experiments on a soon-to-be-former farmhouse in southern Ontario, with catastrophic results. 

This Ain’t Just a Mythbusters Knock-off

Unlike the MythBusters guys (as the press release notes), Wilson and Sousa are “dangerously unqualified” — which doesn’t prevent them from wreaking all manner of havoc on the house and the stuff inside it by doing stupid, unsafe experiments in order to demonstrate things you shouldn’t do. 

In the series’ first two episodes, airing back to back, the duo test various household warnings by setting off fireworks indoors, constructing a walk-in microwave oven, heating canned food on the stovetop and tossing a propane tank in a fire.

In episode two, Wilson and Sousa compare the flammability of various foods, show viewers the explosive dangers of making homemade moonshine and demonstrate why it’s never a good idea to cook eggs in a microwave while they’re still inside their shells. 

Future episodes will find them staging a “death match” between a popcorn maker and a blender, making a spaghetti dinner in a washer/dryer, brewing coffee in a hot-water tank, filling up the tires of a car with air until they explode and using thermite to transform an ordinary car into a convertible.

Never Ever Do This at Home premieres Monday, May 6th, at 6 and 6:30 pm on Discovery.

Originally published in TVW. For daily programming updates and on-screen Entertainment news, subscribe to the free TVW e-newsletters, or purchase a subscription to the weekly magazine.