Conan O'Brien to Host Oscars for First Time; Celebs for Season 3 of Special Forces: World's Toughest Test

Monday, November 18, 2024

Conan O'Brien to Host Oscars for First Time; Celebs for Season 3 of Special Forces: World's Toughest Test

Emmy® Award-winning television host, writer, producer and comedian Conan O'Brien will host the 97th Oscars. It will be O'Brien's first time hosting the broadcast. The Oscars will air live on ABC and broadcast outlets worldwide on Sunday, March 2, 2025, at 7 p.m. EST/4 p.m. PST, with the official live red carpet show airing at 6:30 p.m. EST/3:30 p.m. PST. O'Brien is best known for hosting the late-night talk shows Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien and Conan. Before his more than two-decade-long hosting career, he served as a writer for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. O'Brien currently hosts the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend and recently starred in the 2024 travel show Conan O'Brien Must Go. He has won five Primetime Emmys and earned 31 nominations for his work.

Special Forces: World's Toughest Test

The third season of Fox's ultimate celebrity social experiment, Special Forces: World's Toughest Test, returns for a special five-week event starting Wednesday, January 8 (8:00-10:00PM ET/PT). Each week, the two-hour super charged episodes will feature household names enduring some of the harshest, most grueling challenges from the playbook of the actual Special Forces selection process. This time around, the recruits will be training in Wales, the home of British Special Forces Selection, and will endure the harsh reality of ocean warfare. The recruits must learn the art of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable as they are faced with training challenges across the country's vast terrain of both land and sea, including a high pressure hostage rescue, a treacherous ladder crossing between steep cliffs nearly 100 ft above the sea, a boat dunk drill where they will be submerged into the frigid ocean and tasked with performing essential survival duties, a surf immersion where they will have to control their panic in an exercise that takes them to the brink of drowning, and much more. In this experiment, there are no votes and no eliminations - just survival. These celebrities, who are so used to being in the spotlight, will quickly learn the meaning of "no guts, no glory" - and no glam.

Selection for the Special Forces is a test unlike any other. Sixteen celebrities from all genres and walks of life, will take on, and try to survive, demanding training exercises led by Directing Staff (DS) agents Rudy Reyes, Mark "Billy" Billingham, Jason "Foxy" Fox and Jovon "Q" Quarles, an elite team of ex-special forces operatives. In this unique series, the only way for these recruits to leave is to give up on their own accord, through failure or potential injury, or by force from the DS. Special Forces: World's Toughest Test is the ultimate test of physical, mental and emotional resilience - revealing these celebrities' deepest and truest character. Who will survive, who will fail?

Meet the 16 celebrity recruits joining Special Forces:
Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist Nathan Adrian
Actor Stephen Baldwin
Pro-Surfer and Model Alana Blanchard
Pro Soccer Player Landon Donovan
Motocross Champion Carey Hart
TV Personality and DJ Brody Jenner
Olympic Track and Field Athlete Marion Jones
Influencer and Former Bachelorette Ali Manno (Fedotowsky)
NFL Pro-Bowler Cam Newton
Influencer and Model Kayla Nicole
Actress Kyla Pratt
Actress Denise Richards
Actress and Podcast Host Christy Carlson Romano
Original Bachelorette Trista Sutter
Superbowl Champion Golden Tate
Olympic Gymnastics Gold Medalist Jordyn Wieber