The Amazing Race might seem like on odd way to kick off a new year in the middle of a pandemic, but there it is. It took less than two hours in last week’s curtain-raiser on Race’s milestone 33rd season to remind us what has made the program a favourite all these years with homebound adventure seekers.
Whether it was the young woman who confessed to host Phil Keoghan that she first watched Amazing Race when she was eight-years-old and never dreamed that she might one day actually participate, or the appropriate Darwinian twist of the season’s first pit stop being London’s Natural History Museum — where Keoghan greeted teams mere metres away from the historic marble bust of Charles Robert Darwin, FRS, FRGS, ZSL, born in 1809 and the father of 10 children — The Amazing Race was propelled by pure joy and joie de vivre. That exuberance for life is what has made The Amazing Race so special all these years.
Yes, the teams sometimes quarrel and bicker along the way — one worries on occasion that a lifelong friendship or even a marriage will be sorely tested if not broken entirely — but there is none of the nastiness and cruelty associated with so many reality-competition programs.
This was always going to be a problematic season, though, and by the end of Wednesday’s program the reality of the SARS CoV2 pandemic — aka COVID-19 — will become clear. After worried consultations with Race organizers and producers Elise Doganieri and Bertram van Munster — van Munster, a career cameraman, has directed virtually every hour of Amazing Race’s 33 seasons to date — Keoghan informs the suddenly worried looking racers that the race is being suspended.
Incredibly — and the more one thinks about it, the more incredible it gets — the race will resume 18 months later, with the same teams, starting from the same location where the race was suspended more than a year earlier. It is a little like stopping the Super Bowl after the first quarter and then picking it up with the same teams and the same scoreline more than a year later.
How the hiatus — Keoghan has playfully described it as the program’s longest pit stop in its decades-long history — affects this seasons teams will become more clear in next week’s episode. We already know, though, that this time the race ran its course, the winning team won fairly and squarely, and somehow Doganieri and van Munster made it under the wire before the Omicron variant has thrown another wrench into the whole notion of international travel.
This season’s teams appear well matched, from “the middle-aged mom and dad" who admit “there's an advantage to youth in this race,” to the US service veterans who stopped a terrorist attack aboard a train in France, to the flight attendants who insist their travel experience gives them an edge, but don’t realize that the UK is no longer in the EU, but make it through anyway (“It’s not a big deal! Don’t worry! We’ll redo it!”). That joy for life is evident in every frame, all the more so when the teams are handed a second chance months after the race is interrupted by COVID lockdowns.
The Amazing Race was always fun to watch, but this season it seems downright exhilarating. That’s no accident.
— CBS, Paramount+