The Amazing Race

Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of TARZAN among other things, once began a book with an unnamed narrator discovering the diary of the adventurer the book is about. The narrator tells his readers, “Read one page, and I’ll be forgotten.”

He happened to be right about that, which is why I hope to be forgotten, too, not very far into the volume that follows. But before I fade into the background I need to make a little confession, odd indeed considering the subject matter.

I hate reality television.

I loathe the concocted situations, vapid contestants, and sniggering sexuality of the series that hinge on speed dating, cruel pranks, staged conflicts, and the ubiquitous hunger for fifteen minutes of fame.

I hate the television news segments that headline the developments on these shows on days that should be dominated by developments of greater import.

I hate shows built on stunts, where people scramble for prizes by humiliating themselves in the most appalling ways possible.

I especially despise the bickering-celebs-at-home subgenre: fine entertainment for those who like being locked in a room with the kind of dysfunctional personalities most sane people would cross the street to avoid.

It therefore follows that I avoid the genre when I can.

And yet I follow THE AMAZING RACE with awestruck, envious devotion.

Why?

In part, because I just love the set.

The frantic contestants racing around the world in frantic search of that million-dollar check have their eyes on more than the prize. They’re confronting the very diversity of the human experience on this planet, testing not only their speed and skill but also their ability to function in places where their language, their appearance, and their expectations render them alien.

Anybody who’s ever run for a plane at the last minute, anybody who’s ever come face to face with the poverty of the third world, and everybody who’s ever left an overseas resort to explore the countryside and meet the locals, has been on an Amazing Race.

And if contestants behave badly, as they often do, then that’s interesting too, because anybody who’s ever suffered the frustrations of travel runs the risk of doing the same thing. We all know what it’s like to drive down strange roads, in places unknown to us, and argue with companions who insist on blaming us for being lost. We’ve all fought over whether she should have taken that left instead of that right. And we’ve all found unsuspected prejudices revealed when locals speaking strange tongues fail to understand what we’ve said to them very, very slowly.

This is hard enough when we’re just trying to find our way to the next major highway. Imagine how much more difficult it must be, when a million dollars rides on getting there first, and you never know what country you’ll be flying off to in a matter of hours. Imagine that the road between you and that million dollars has been rendered a minefield of challenges capable of testing your courage, your dedication, and your ability to adapt to strange customs in faraway lands. Imagine having to travel the route at such a punishing speed that the barriers between you and victory include hunger, thirst, jet lag, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation.

Imagine, finally, that your every waking moment is filmed, and that people will be judging you by your attitude as well as your skill.

Some Reality-TV contestants whine and moan because they’re locked in a house for a few weeks. AMAZING RACE contestants plow fields in Thailand, hang-glide in Brazil, deliver tea in India, climb mountains in Canada, make bricks in India, descend into catacombs in Egypt and ascend pyramids in Mexico. They engage in pastimes like ox-surfing and witness the gulf between extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Along the way, they struggle with their fears and find themselves accomplishing things that many among them would have considered impossible. A few push themselves to the limits of their endurance, and beyond: others make mistakes they never could have imagined. They laugh, they weep, they break down, they argue, they declare that they can’t go on, and then they go on anyway. Some learn about themselves and some, just as pointedly, don’t.

Players learn about their partners, too. Some couples have broken up, forever, on-screen. Others have cemented their relationships and gone on to successful marriages. Racers partnered with their family members have found unsuspected reserves of strength in their fathers and mothers and siblings. They have wept from partners showing unsuspected reserves of strength or demonstrated superhuman patience in the face of partners about as useful as dead cats.

THE AMAZING RACE is, in short, a show rich with comedy, drama, and agonizing twists of fate. It boasts the virtues that so many of its reality-show competitors lack: humanity, a broad canvas relevant to the world we live in, a premise that celebrates human diversity, and a structure that measures the character of its contestants in ways that go beyond willingness to embarrass themselves for fame and glory. It helps, too, that its contestants have shown as much warmth, humor, and nobility as the far more typical fame-whore brattiness.

Is it entirely immune from the geek-show antics that have afflicted so many programs of its type? No, it’s not. It has its own questionable elements. Among them: the food challenges that sometimes require contestants to eat until they gag. It’s perfectly acceptable to confront racers with food distasteful to western sensibilities, less so to make them eat so much that the sheer volume renders them ill. And, though it’s perfectly acceptable to force contestants to live within a very strict budget, and deal with the consequences if they run out, it’s less so to deliberately take their money away in impoverished foreign countries, and therefore make a game out of begging for money in places where many less fortunate people beg just to stay alive. Too, the friction between teams, and between teammates, sometimes goes beyond the merely stressed into the realm of the downright unpleasant: a factor that especially afflicted Race 6, where a number of the more congenial teams fell out early. Elements like these provide some of the show’s worst moments, pushing it over the line from international adventure from international freak show.

Against that, we have the classic moments, ranging from comedy to tragedy, with everything in between. Chip and Kim, stopping to spend a few moments with an African family in Race 5; Joyce, weeping as her head is shaved in Race 7; the Guidos, rocking leg after leg until they make a fatal mistake late in race 1; Billy and Carissa singing “Coming “Round the Mountain“ in Race 8. And even if you ignore the drama in the foreground, you still have those marvelous locations in the background: from great natural wonders like “the cloud that thunders,“ to the glimpses of life as it is lived in other places. Write off every single contestant and you still have the glories of our world, featuring sights rarely seen in any conventional travelogue or documentary. It’s all here, on one show, along with vivid personalities, hair-breadth cliffhangers, and infuriating twists of fate.

Is it “reality”? Some embittered participants say, not at all. They claim fabricated storylines and producer interference favoring some teams at the expense of others. It’s hard not to see some of their complaints as sour grapes, but it’s also hard to miss the moments when the seams show. The practical difficulties involved just in mounting a show on this scale are so enormous that it’s amazing any of the proceedings feel spontaneous at all. But it’s not exactly a scripted drama, either. From the moment that first mob of players leaves the starting point, to the moment the three final teams converge on the finish line, their journey is up to them.

A few words about the format of this book.

First, our AMAZING RACE episode synopses are brief and fragmentary compared to some of the obsessive recaps available online. A book attempting to cover the events of the series in that kind of detail would need to be five times the length of this one. Readers who wish that kind of coverage are hereby encouraged to check the host of blogs and recap sites available. The most extensive of these, www.televisionwithoutpity.com, recaps the adventures of our hustling Americans at a length you might find exhausting. The shows are also discussed, ad nauseum, on bulletin boards, whose denizens write literally hundreds of posts debating every last detail of every episode in encyclopedic detail. Racers are correct in noting that some of these posts cross the line past mere fascination into the realm of the mad. But rather than duplicate that material, this book will zip past it as quickly as possible before moving on to explore other aspects of the show and its attendant issues.

Second, this book must examine the personalities involved, sometimes critically, but cautions readers to exercise extreme skepticism when applying any such observations to the lives any of these people live outside the show. In the past, some overwrought viewers, angered by what they’ve seen, have gone beyond calling individual racers assholes. They’ve called for the dissolution of marriages, made assumptions about the intricacies of racer sex lives, and even, once or twice, hoped for racers to experience physical harm. In the sixth race alone, one racer was, based on the impression he left on-screen, widely and almost universally assumed to be a wife-beater. Another, though traveling with a girlfriend, was declared a closeted homosexual. A third was branded a racist. Other racers have been branded crazy, or worse, by bloggers who make no bones about how much they “hate” them. Even the children appearing in Race 8 endured such sweeping criticisms by viewers who should have known better: three episodes into the competition, the youngest scion of the Black Family, 7, has already been called “useless”, and the Gaghan kids, 9 and 12, “creepy.”

(Of that last extremity, I can only say: there are few people more useless and creepy than grown adults capable of spending their internet hours writing hateful things about children competing on reality shows. I can understand targeting the adults. They placed themselves in the cross-hairs. But these are kids, people. Do you really want to be sitting there at 3 AM, in your mother‘s basement, telling people across the country about how much you “hate“ a nine-year-old girl? If you do, I don‘t want to know you. Get a grip.)

The thing is, I know where blather like this comes from. Reality shows follow many of the same rules as conventional dramas, in that we’re invited to form opinions on the character of individuals presented to us at moments of crisis of stress. We have no problem judging Hamlet or Tom Joad or Gilligan or Bobby Ewing, after similar exposure, so why not judge Colin Guin or Jonathan Baker or Flo Pesenti the same way?

The answer, of course, is that fictional characters are designed, by their creators, to create a given impression, and that even when the nature of that impression is open to debate, the entirety of the relevant evidence is provided for us. Had Stanley Kowalski, male lead of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, donated a tenth of his salary, every week, to local widows and orphans, there would have been a line to that effect in the play. So it’s pretty safe to assume he doesn’t. We enjoy the same freedom to assume with every other fictional character. By contrast, when we watch Colin or Jonathan or Flo, or any of the people who create lasting impressions on a show like THE AMAZING RACE, we are only getting the smallest part of their individual stories.

I know I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be judged, forever, by people who know me only by my behavior during a certain awful weekend in New Orleans, more than a decade ago. It was a bad couple of days, ruined by upsetting conflict with my traveling companions, and it led me to fits of hysteria almost as bad as anything you’ve ever seen from the most hysterical racer discussed here. If I can maintain, now, that the “me” people witnessed during that weekend was a skewed sample, then I must concede the same is likely true for the Colin and Jonathan and Flo visible in the edited sequences available to viewers.
Even the most contentious personalities here have been captured during what may have been one of the most frenetic, stressful, and exhausting times of their lives. Imagine the worst things you say in any given month, let alone one crazy month, all edited together, and you might feel a little more kindly disposed toward the show’s villains. Imagine your very best moments, given the same treatment, and you might find yourself skeptical about the show’s heroes. This book will talk about what these people do on-screen, discuss their behavior, and call them names, but anything in that vein deals only with the personalities they display in the course of the show, and is an extremely unreliable way to judge the kind of people they are once the cameras stop rolling.

So I am not interested in judging these people as people, any more than I’ve been interested, in conducting my interviews, in being the conduit for any further bad feelings between racers (some of whom remained quite anxious to further their cases against other teams). I’m not going to be able to avoid these topics completely, as such shifting tensions have often been instrumental factors in the contest. And it’s impossible to watch the show, let alone cover it, without developing affection for some racers and open dislike for others. even the most contentious personalities here have been captured during what may have been one of the most frenetic, stressful, and exhausting times of their lives. Imagine the worst things you say in any given month, let alone one crazy month, all edited together, and you might feel a little more kindly disposed toward the show’s villains. Imagine your very best moments, given the same treatment, and you might find yourself skeptical about the show’s heroes. This book will talk about what these people do on-screen, discuss their behavior, and call them names, but anything in that vein deals only with the personalities they display in the course of the show, and is an extremely unreliable way to judge the kind of people they are once the cameras stop rolling.

Thirdly, I have for the most part decided to ignore any other TV or reality-show experience enjoyed by the racers. Yes, it’s fun to know that Chip McAllister, an actor in his younger days, appeared as the young Muhammad Ali in THE GREATEST; or that one member of The Bouncer Brothers also appeared on FEAR FACTOR; or that any number of racers have parlayed the notoriety they received here into later gigs on MAD TV, KILL REALITY, BATTLE OF THE REALITY-TV STARS, Dr. Phil, and The Travel Channel. But none of that has any relevance to their performances on AMAZING RACE, and will not be discussed here. The only exceptions to that rule: Alison Irwin, from Race 5, whose contentious relationship with her boyfriend Donny Patrick was foreshadowed by her actions on BIG BROTHER; and Rob Mariano and Amber Brkich (“Team Truman Show“), whose previous history on SURVIVOR and SURVIVOR ALL-STARS had a lot to do with making them The Team To Beat during Race 7.

Fourthly, I have taken the liberty of declaring some of the teams, usually three per race, as Season Superstars. These are not necessarily the finalists. Indeed, some get wiped out halfway through. And they’re not always the most likeable, either. They are simply the folks, selected by myself, as the ones who made the best television. If you disagree with my choices, or if you think these and other awards given in the course of this book wrongheaded in any way, then tough noogies. These choices may be arbitrary, but they are mine1.

And Fifthly: I will refrain from using the word “Philimination.” It’s a cool neologism, coined by fans, which refers to the sad duty host Phil Keoghan performs every time he tells a late-arriving team that they’ve been eliminated from competition. It’s also a task he performs extraordinarily well, as witnessed by the sheer number of Race fans who have approached him, off-season, to request their own, personal Philimination. (Oddly, nobody asks to be told they’ve just won a million dollars.) I avoid the word only because the format of this book will require me to use it more than eighty times, in episode synopses alone, and I suspect its humor value will start to pall by number forty or fifty.

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