We love Phil!

The Amazing Race is, hands-down, my favourite reality show ever. And yes, part of it is due to Phil Keoghan (love him), but that’s not all. The premise is clever: use your wits to follow clues and travel around the world faster than the other teams. I like contests that rely more on wits than looks or physical strength. Not to say that looks and physical strength don’t factor in TAR, they do; but you simply can’t rely on them entirely (as you can in Survivor, for instance).

So I’ve always enjoyed the show, but I’ve never enjoyed the contestants as much as I have this season. Usually by this point in the game, there are some teams that I just hate. Some teams are underhanded, using the excuse “it’s part of the game” or “we’re playing for a million dollars” to justify things like stealing taxis or telling travel agents to lie to their opponents. Other teams are just embarrassingly painful to watch. These fall into three general categories:

The Mean Boyfriend Team

Eliminated in Leg One: Jennifer & Preston

There’s almost unfailingly a team of a young, attractive and athletic couple who are dating and want to use the race “to see if we’re meant for each other” or some other such claptrap. Once they get going, we quickly see that the handsome and fit young man is nothing more than a bully who yells at his fake-blonde, fake-boobed girlfriend for her supposedly inferior map-reading skills, or her failure to run fast enough or her general stupidity. And, to be fair, a good share of these girls are lame and somewhat useless, too. But it still drives me crazy to see these guys just trashing their girlfriends on TV, and then to have them be all “oh, he’s just so competitive…he hates to lose…” in the debrief. BARF. In season 14, we got rid of this team in Episode 1 when Jen and Preston were eliminated.

The Obnoxious American Team

Charla and Mirna, anyone?

And then there’s the team who make you feel profoundly relieved not to be American. These are the type who speak English really slowly and loudly wherever they go (maybe even with a put-on accent *cough* charlaandmirna *cough*), on the grounds that this will somehow make them understood by their Mandarin-speaking taxi driver. Or else they speak some form of pidjin Spanish they’ve cobbled together from Sesame Street and Dora commercials – even if they do happen to be in Germany. They’re ignorant and judgmental of other cultures and are often rude: behaving, everywhere they go, like Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s European Vacation.

The Slutty Flirty Team

Looks will take you far...

These teams just demonstrate that blonde hair and fake boobs will take you very far in this world. Literally. Although I was betting on flight attendants (and blondes) Christie and Jodi to fill this niche in Season 14, they didn’t bite. Nope - nobody will ever be able to do dumb and blonde like Dustin and Kandace did. This pair took their whitened teeth, surgically enhanced breasts and Clairol locks on a world tour in Seasons 10 & 11 and flirted their way through to the final three in Season 11. What frustrated me most about them was that they are not actually dumb. But they often chose to rely on their looks and – let’s be frank here – sex appeal, in many situations where a clear head would have seen them through just as well. 

So this season, it’s weird…from episode 2 onwards I’ve been sad to see each team leave. And although we’ve got cheerleaders Cara and Jaime sliding into the Obnoxious American role (the more they yell at cabbies in English, the closer they get…), and we got rid of Mean Boyfriend/Lame Girlfriend when Preston and Jennifer were voted out, everyone else is, well, amazingly nice.

And I’m amazingly enjoying it!