“Amazing” Reality Show

There have been 20 seasons of The Amazing Race and Sunday night started Season 21.  Even if you aren’t a huge reality television fan, this show is fun and different.  My husband and I have not missed a season since it started.  We love watching the travel and the tasks.  We will watch the show and play along.  We make our choice of tasks and then as we watch them we decide if it was something we would be able to do or if we made a bad decision that would likely cost us the game.
We will typically resist choosing a favorite team because the few times we’ve done that from the first episode we’ve typically been disappointed with the behavior of the couple after a few episodes.  So we won’t tell you our favorites right now, but they may come up in discussion at a later time.
With the road trips that we have taken over the years, we have experienced many of the stresses with one person navigating for the other.  We’ve just never done it for $1 million.  Or as they’ve bumped the prize money this year, $2 million.
I think the reason we enjoy this show so much is that if you fail and end up off the show it is basically your own fault.  It’s not a popularity contest, there is very little game play, and the only outside forces that could cause you issues is with transportation.  There is no situation where the other teams decide to vote you out. If you hit the mat last, it is totally your fault. 
So for the next several weeks we will plan our Sunday nights around “The Amazing Race” and enjoy travels to interesting places around the globe that we will likely never see in person, but we can experience them through the culture and interaction of the contestants with the locals.
This morning I read an interesting interview in the Los Angeles Times with the married couple who developed and produce the show, Bertram van Munster and Elise Doganieri.  You can read it here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-st-amazing-race-conversation-20120930,0,5018694.story.  And Bertram and Elise - let me know if you have any job openings for location scouting as I'd be up to the task.