The Amazing Race

The CBS show Viva, Laughlin was kind enough to suck hard enough to be cancelled after two episodes, which meant that CBS replaced it with one of my favorite shows, The Amazing Race, which is in its twelfth go-round. The premiere episode aired on Sunday night.

What I like most about the show is the premise, which is pretty simple: teams of two race around the world, the first across the finish line getting a million bucks. Along the way they are forced to complete tasks of varying degrees of difficulty, and perhaps most difficult of all, have to get along with each other. If there's any way to bring stress to the most harmonious relationship it's to be lost somewhere with a person. The other appeal is the chance to see many different places one wouldn't ordinarily see. They've been to Paris, London and Tokyo, but they've also been to remote corners of the globe like Madagascar and Sri Lanka. I always get a kick out of seeing provincial Americans forced to deal with the cultures of other lands.

The show has some problems, though. They try to be diverse in the casting, but every year it seems like there is some bland couple that ends up winning. They have curtailed the casting of two buff "alpha" males, who have an advantage with anything that requires physical strength, but they also seem to stack the deck with generically attractive young dating couples. The only entertainment value they bring is looking good in bathing suits or screaming at each other when something goes wrong, as did a couple in the first episode when they couldn't get an Irish donkey to move. That being said, the producers have given this season some color by casting a pair of married lesbian ministers, and a Goth couple (pictured above). I'm not familiar with many of the Goth customs, but I'm guessing the producers told them to be as Goth as humanly possible, so we got a couple of kids running around the Irish countryside with pink hair, and saying things like "Oh my Goth."

One of the advantages of this show over Survivor and Big Brother is that the strong, swift and smart are rewarded. The other shows dynamic encourages blocs that can vote out who might otherwise be the best player (and thus very often weak or neutral players win). The Amazing Race occasionally has brief alliances of teams helping each other out, but the cream inevitably rises to the crop. No one can coast to victory in this show.

The seed of my interest in this show stems back to one of my favorite movies, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which was about a group of people trying to out-race one another to find a treasure. Of course, in that film laws were broken with regularity and the comic mayhem landed them all in hospital beds. The impish part of me would like to see a show like that, with the host saying, "There's a million dollars buried in such and such a place. First one there gets it. There are no rules. Go!"