It's come to my attention that the only TV I really go out of my way to make time for these days are competitive shows. The Amazing Race, The Next Iron Chef, Around the Horn, Top Chef, and Chopped. The astute among you will note that that's also three competitive cooking shows out of five. Let's have a look at the shows in chronological order and see what I think of them and why you might like them. We'll start with The Amazing Race.
The Amazing Race has been the gold standard of reality shows for quite some time. Survivor may be both older and more popular, but The Amazing Race is simply better. The show follows a number of teams of two in a race around the world. Each team has a pre-existing relationship, be it friends, family, lovers, and so on. Each episode usually represents a single leg of the race and, with some exceptions, the last team to arrive at that leg's destination is eliminated from the race. This goes on from episode to episode until, in the finale, there are three teams left. The first team to reach the finish line splits one million dollars.
I'm a big fan of the show, even though I've missed around half of its nineteen seasons, as the show does two seasons a year. For me, it represents the best of the competitive shows. That's because that while a strong relationship with your partner or with your competitors can help, having a bad relationship doesn't mean you're doomed. In other words, victory or defeat is purely about whether or not you make it over the finish line before the other teams. There's no tribal councils, no alliances to vote people off, no votes from the audience at home. Get across the line first and you win. Get across the line last and you lose. There's nothing in-between. And that alone makes for a more interesting show to me.
With the show entering its twentieth season, I recently watched a copy of the first season on DVD. The differences are instructive. The show was harder back then. The tasks you had to overcome were more challenging, and the clues as to how to get from place to place generally less clear cut. Furthermore, the spreading of smartphones makes it a lot easier to just get your taxi driver to look up directions to a place you've never heard of, which was something you really couldn't do back in 2001 when the show debuted.
The show was more tactical, too. In the first season there was a Fast Forward on every leg of the race except the last one. The first team to get to a Fast Forward could use it to skip all tasks and go straight to the finish line of that leg. But a team could only use the Fast Forward once in the race, so it was a big deal to decide to go for it. Furthermore, if you went for it but another team beat you to it, you could end up even further behind, as the Fast Forward is usually well off the race route. Nowadays, however, there's only one or two Fast Forwards in each race, so you might as well grab it when you can. So the teams in the lead, who don't really need it, usually grab the Fast Forward and pad their leads, while the teams who are behind don't even bother since it's almost certainly gone by the time they get there.
The show has gotten better in some ways, though. The inclusion of the U-Turn, a once or twice per race opportunity to force another team to go back and do another task before they can move on, allows teams to go on the offensive in a way that wasn't available in the early races. The production values are better, and the fact that they've done this for 11 years shows in how they schedule tasks. It isn't possible for a team to get an eleven hour lead like one team did in the first Race, and damned difficult for a team to get a full 24 hours behind the others the way one team did in that race too.
So even though I'm not sure the modern version of the race is particularly better than the 2001 version, I'll still be there when the show comes back next month for the twentieth season.
The world is waiting...
EDIT: It occurs to me that I've already discussed Chopped on this blog. Things haven't changed such that the old entry is invalid, so you can read it here.
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