The Original Episodes of ‘Jackass’ Are Finally on Streaming

Most of the stunts and sketches that appeared on the TV version of Jackass have been widely available online and on DVD for many years. But the original episodes as they aired on MTV from 2000 to 2002 have been harder to come by.

Ever since Paramount started releasing Jackass on home video, they’ve been chopping them up, releasing them in new cuts, with the pranks all out of order. They also put out volumes 2 and 3 of the show before they ever put out volume 1, just to make things extra confusing.

At last, you can now watch Jackass the way its creators intended — on your phone while you sit on the toilet — and you can watch the old episodes as they were originally constructed. Paramount+ announced today that the entire three-season run of MTV’s Jackass is back on its streaming service. The episodes on streaming “restore key creative elements that had been altered over time.”

Here was Jackass star and producer Johnny Knoxville’s comment on the news:

In the time since the release of Jackass 26 years ago, the television episodes had been re-edited, re-sequenced, and re-scored to the point they were unrecognizable. I found this out the hard way last year when attempting to watch them. Eeek! But kudos to Paramount for giving us the $$ to restore the shows to how they initially aired in the first place. We can’t wait until you see all the terrible things we did to each other way back then and in the manner we intended!

The Jackass crew created 25 episodes of the show in those first three years of its existence. That’s not much content for a series that’s loomed so large in pop culture for the last quarter of a century. But when Jackass premiered on MTV in the fall of 2000 it became an immediate sensation, and a lightning rod for controversy, and MTV aired it basically nonstop for the next few years.

Then the franchise moved to the big-screen with 2002’s Jackass: The Movie. It became a hit, and launched a franchise that continues to this day. The next Jackass movie, Jackass: Best and Last, premieres in theaters on June 26.

Knoxville has said this will be the final film the group creates together, although it would the ultimate Jackass prank to say that and then reunite when they’re all in their 70s for a geriatric version of the show.