Race in the Hole

There are very few competitive reality shows that have demonstrated the longevity of The Amazing Race - indeed, to the best of my knowledge the only ones to have matched the show's twenty-six seasons are the creatively-titled The Real World spinoff The Challenge (also airing its 26th season at the time of writing), CBS stablemate Survivor (which just began its 30th), and the British version of Big Brother (33, with the caveat that over half are shortened celebrity seasons and other similar spinoffs). But where the problems with those shows are fairly easy to point out succinctly - The Challenge's recurring cast being so familiar and awful even the contempt is breeding contempt, the Big Brother UK producers valuing style over substance, and Jeff Probst - The Amazing Race has experienced a rougher fall from grace than any of them, seemingly almost out of nowhere. So the question must be asked... why has this show declined so much so suddenly?

To analyse the situation, we must first look back about halfway through the show's lifetime to the fourteenth season, one that is incredibly divisive in fandom but which the show's producers seem to inexplicably love. There were two big changes this season that affected how the show developed: firstly, the producers thought the cast was too friendly towards each other and started turning the usual "eat, sleep, and mingle" rest between racing legs into a sequestration period with food to make the contestants crankier and more antagonistic towards each other, then on a more superficial level it was the first time the show's graphics got a major overhaul. The results of these were underwhelming to say the least - the casts for this season and the next two went down as three of the most unpopular sets in the show's history, and most of the lesser graphical changes were retooled very quickly even if the most troublesome of all (the subtext behind the new logo being akin to the show calling itself bigger than Jesus) remained - but by and large what's most important here is that this also happened to be right at the point the show rather paradoxically lost its confidence and started with a whole lot of self-affirming bluster about how capital-letters-and-fingerquotes "AMAZING" it was. On top of all of this, it's the first season to actively avoid new countries (Romania gets its first visit and Switzerland gets a second, both for single episodes with extended travel sequences that mean they really don't get started until about twenty minutes in, while everywhere else is appearing for at least the third time) and the entire back half of the route is a stale copy of the very first race, plus there are huge challenge design problems with many tasks favouring cheap comedy over being classy towards local cultures, so it's fair to say it's not one of the better ones. Sure, there were certainly attempts to remedy both the casting errors and the task design in later seasons, but it seemed as if the show seemed to think the opposite of "negative" was "not negative" and thus we got several middling seasons that kind of did nothing for anybody.

Which brings us a bit closer to the present day. You see, after a particularly controversial slip in The Amazing Race 22 that managed to offend people on both sides of the Vietnam War (the show routinely uses an alternate set of race flags in Vietnam as the usual design is similar to the flag of the former South Vietnam, yet in this instance the usual race flags turned up at a downed US jet left as a monument to North Vietnam's victory in the war, although of COURSE the conservative media only took offense at the side where Real I Was Born Here Americans got angry), there was a concerted effort to revitalise the show again. And the following season was legitimately quite good, especially if you can ignore the premiere and the finale, which have been such a sticking point for so long that it would have been more shocking if they weren't. Unfortunately, those are the episodes that tend to stick in the minds of viewers, and with the second episode of the season being the next least impressive (which I'm sure has absolutely nothing to do with Chile being one of a handful of countries that keeps turning up despite it never hosting a great leg in any franchise), the season was doomed from the start even though that middle run of episodes (from Leg 3 to Leg 8, certainly, and you could make a case for including Leg 9) is genuinely the best run of episodes the show had produced since at least the opening half of season ten, if not earlier.

So how, then, do you react to viewers not getting invested in the season? Well, if you're this particular set of producers, it's only too logical to put the problems with premiere design in the too-hard basket like so many "find a clue buried on a beach" premiere tasks of yore and instead decide to make season 24 an All-Stars season featuring memorable players from prior seasons. With the previous such season steadfastly refusing to cast from the early seasons under the belief that nobody would remember them (not that the show was available on DVD or anything, or that giving people a reason to buy them would make the show more profitable), the problem should be apparent: the teams that weren't milquetoast were almost universally teams who, frankly, were assholes who made for terrible viewing. So the cast was probably never going to be perfect, but out of all of the possible combinations you could have come up with from the six seasons considered, there's basically only one or two ways the season could have had a worse cast. And we very nearly got it. The basic problem, really, was that the cast included seven teams who filled the same Big Character archetype that appeals only to a vocal Twitter minority (including three who were making their third appearance and had all well and truly worn out their welcomes by the end of their first appearances), two teams who got in because of the unusual ways in which they were booted early in their first season rather than because they were entertaining (both of whom proved to be utter funsucks), a filler team seemingly only cast because it's not an Amazing Race without a team of generic blonde women who vow to use sex appeal to get ahead, and a team who was generally received well but was still a lesser imitation of better past teams. So your odds were basically one in eleven that the season was going to turn out well, but then one half of the good team was forced out of the game before starting due to a medical emergency, forcing the show to either scrap the team entirely or give the healthy partner a new teammate with a tenuous connection to him. They did the latter, and wound up being one of the most uncomfortable teams to watch in years before they were mercifully eliminated in Leg 2. (This will be important in a moment.)

So the self-congratulatory season 24 was a bust, mostly because the recent seasons were dull and it was more of the same featuring the teams you didn't like the first time around. Naturally, the cure was... to make season 25 even more self-congratulatory? I kid, a little, but that's definitely one of the numerous big problems with the season, which succeeded in spite of its changes rather than because of them. The anniversary theme itself is a tough one because while I have no objections to doing it in theory, the way it was handled was kind of a failure. Put simply, the show also decided to finally do the island-locations theme that had been mooted by fans since at least season four (every single place visited except Morocco and the final city of Los Angeles was an island, and even the LA leg included a shipping task and a lighthouse), and having the anniversary theme on top of that meant neither shined the way they were meant to because the show spent a significant portion of the season ticking off memorable past tasks to recycle instead of capitalising on filming in places they'd probably never use otherwise, with the end result obviously being that precisely none of these recycled tasks lived up to the originals while the new tasks felt particularly uninspired, almost as if they'd been taken from a 1960s version of Wikipedia. (On behalf of the viewership, I thank the show for not referring to Berber nomads as "noble savages", but on the other hand they really should have avoided spelling Marrakech "Marrakesh" in the final task.)

There was also two other stylistic additions that didn't work and has inexplicably survived into the current season. One of them we'll save for later because Oh Yes There Will Be Ranting, but the other was having host Phil Keoghan make cameos on the course, introducing tasks while teams are running past. Sure, it was cute the first time it happened, but even as early as its second appearance it felt like a running joke that had run its course. And breaking the fourth wall and taking viewers out of the show just for a sight gag - not to mention giving some teams an advantage in knowing their positions because Phil mentions it - just isn't worth it.

In terms of the actual race itself though, there were three new twists. First is the Save, a shameless and extremely flawed attempt to seemingly answer an executive note from CBS asking why the show doesn't have something like Survivor's Hidden Immunity Idol or Big Brother's Power of Veto. And there are two incredibly obvious answers: (1) Non-elimination legs, and (2) Why don't Survivor and Big Brother have ten Emmy awards? But of course, the problem doesn't end there. The way it was handled, it could be used at any elimination up to and including Leg 9 to spare its holder. Except the problem is it couldn't be used in what was already a predetermined non-elimination leg (as we saw when the team tried to save themselves in Leg 4), meaning that for them to actually be eliminated they needed to finish last in an elimination leg, forfeit the Save, and then finish last again in another elimination leg. Not seeing why that's an issue yet? You soon will.

The second of these was the mid-race twist of having teams faced with two tasks at what the show calls a Detour and forcing them to pick a task knowing only their arbitrary titles. This one here undeniably had the most chance of succeeding out of the three twists, but even then the execution was abysmal. Pairing the twist with the two most lopsided Detours of the season, and giving those Detours lame and unhelpful titles on top of that, was an awful decision that turned what could have been an interesting study in decision-making into "don't pick whichever one of 'This' and 'That' is an hour away". I love that there was an attempt to create a mid-season twist in an era where reality shows have all but given up on the concept, and in another situation - say, season 22's choice between Tasty Puddin' and Whisky Rollin', in which the tasks (making haggis or rolling whisky barrels up cobblestone streets, because SCOTLAND) were fairly balanced and were right next to each other meaning your only decision is in whether to take the task that suggests a food-eating task - it'd work well, but here? No.

The last twist, and by far the most actually stupid because there is at least a way to justify coming up with the concept of the Save, was the decision to get rid of the elimination in the penultimate leg and have four teams in the final leg instead of the final three. A pre-finale non-elimination is perfectly fine in theory, and indeed most of the "classic seasons" had them, but this was catastrophic. Not only was the previous leg before this also a non-elimination, meaning that a season that didn't have all too much suspense to begin with gave up on limping home to a conclusion and called a taxi (no doubt earning a time penalty for not walking as specified in the clue), but the final four was cut down to the standard final three with a mid-leg elimination anyway, defeating the entire purpose. So in essence you have a Save that all but guarantees its winner a place in the final leg given the unlikely odds of finishing last twice in a specific subset of six legs, combined with removing the lid from the metaphorical pressure cooker, combined with a twist that amounted to letting a team get all the way to the finale without getting to finish the race? Beyond awful. Put simply, it's the least thought-out twist in the show's history (and I'm including the early-years non-elimination penalty that amounted to begging for money in havens of wealth such as Senegal), but it still pales in comparison to the show's attempt to embrace social media.

The show's existing social media strategy was actually quite good - one hashtag for the show, then Phil hosting a Q&A during broadcasts when he wasn't busy filming. But due to what I can only assume was more CBS meddling, the usual team relationship chyrons that appear onscreen were replaced for season 25 (and now for 26) with team hashtags ranging from the cutesy reminders of Treasure Hunters and Expedition Impossible and the other knockoffs I'm probably forgetting (#SoulSurfers) to the inane (any of the #TheSharedOccupation hashtags) to the pointless and spoilery (is there any way they would have kept #TheDatingCouple as a hashtag if the team had lasted more than two legs?). Here's the thing: It doesn't work. In fact, speaking in my official capacity as manager of Australia's national Twitter account, it actively hinders the show. Within the context of this pre-recorded show, the only way hashtags are valuable is by making the show trend, and splitting the number of tweets about the show over twelve hashtags - especially when it's just been moved from a high-rating Sunday slot to the Friday Night Death Slot and the timeslot move wasn't advertised particularly well - is a disastrous decision. And that's even before you consider the hashtags themselves don't seem to have been created with either an understanding that economy is key on Twitter - you only have 140 characters to work with, so nobody will ever use hashtags with fifteen to twenty characters on a regular basis - or that Twitter is an interactive medium. With the creators of this show also heavily involved with The Quest and its brilliant embrace of social media, it's inconceivable to think that a show like The Amazing Race that's usually pretty good at whatever it does (even if the risks don't always pan out quite as intended) is failing so spectacularly at this.

Which is, finally, how we get to the current season. Throughout the entire run of The Amazing Race, there has been only two constants: that Phil will be delightful (though even that is waning now he's turning into Kiwi Probst), and that the least entertaining, most forgettable team of the season will be a young dating couple. So, naturally, the season is made up exclusively of dating couples, five of whom are actually solo applicants the show has paired up for "the most extreme blind dates ever". Because heaven knows what we've wanted all these years is more footage of people who've barely met being unpleasant. And which teams did they use to showcase the concept of "dating couple" in a season-opening montage? A whole bunch of the most awful couples of recent years, several of whom have broken up since, plus the aforementioned #TheDatingCouple, plus a random dating couple from a decade ago that nobody could identify in a line-up. Not, say, any of the dating couples who were received positively over the years, or either of the two lesbian couples from the show's history (which is especially noteworthy in this, the first season ever without an all-female team, even moreso because a female team won last season). And if this gimmick wasn't enough to doom the show - and even the producers themselves appear to think it is, given they have openly made "at least it's not the Family Edition, right?" comparisons to the most-hated season of the show in multiple preseason interviews - giving the teams phones to take selfies of their journey certainly is. Because you know what I want to watch in the middle of a race for a million dollars? People taking selfies. (Indeed, in Episode 2, people pausing to do so led to an anticlimactic elimination when they missed their train.)

Frankly, the combination of the selfies, plus the season theme, plus the hashtag debacle makes me think all of these changes are being forced upon the show by a clueless CBS executive who wants to make the show cool for a younger market yet still thinks MTV is a music channel. Like, I'm pretty sure the "most extreme blind dates" spiel was pitched in a memo that spelled it "X-Treme" and may have also included the non-word "kewl". If the show gets another season (and it could go either way at this point), it really needs to be a back-to-basics season with no new changes or gimmicks, and most if not all of the existing ones removed. Of course change over time is inevitable, and the show is going to be completely different now than it was back when the first season was airing after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. But not only is it not that show, it's not the show it was when the forgettable dating couple from the montage was racing. It's not the show that took baby steps to recover from the season fourteen mess. It's not the show that took a hit with the Vietnam incident but had enough goodwill to survive it. It's not the show that had a renaissance just eighteen months ago. It's not even the show that I found myself falling back in love with when I was writing the challenge guide late last year. All of those shows are far better than this.

The World is Waiting for You: A Brief Obsessive Guide to The Amazing Race

Still the best/only non-Bigger-than-Jesus show logo.

Here you go. (PDF, 1.36MB.)

I was planning on waiting until next week to release this, but with recent events we totally need a pick-me-up right about now. Consider it an early Christmas/on-time Hannukah/late Ramadan present. And so, to celebrate the finale of The Amazing Race's 25th season, it's the next in my series of reality show challenge guides. It's not quite complete because there are seasons currently airing and one that's finished too recently to get done in time, but they'll all be added in later versions. (I'll also hopefully be back sometime next week with the latest in my other ongoing series of posts, analysing and criticising said 25th Amazing Race season. Because as much as a whole bunch of things worked, a whole bunch more didn't.)

Which brings me to the other big news I was hinting at (if you came here just because of the guide, feel free to skip this bit): This is the last full-show guide I'll be releasing. From here on out, I'll be releasing seasons individually and combining them into a single giant compendium, allowing me to cover smaller shows without feeling like I have to come up with a way to justify picking, like, The Quest (delightful) over Big Brother (...not delightful). And when I say "giant", I mean it: including rewriting the old guides into a consistent format, the list of shows I want to get done is currently at over 130 entries and being added to all the time. The actual format is going to be almost identical to the one used for this Amazing Race guide, partly but not entirely because after watching that much of the show I have no burning desire to ultramarathon it again for a little while, and the only non-visual change is (obviously) removing the location column.

So that's where we stand right now: with the promise of more output, even if still only occasional, but also with more reason for all of us to keep remembering this blog exists. And that can only be a good thing.

The Amazing Revival (Spoiler: It's Crap)

Yesterday, before the first episode of The Amazing Race: Australia vs. New Zealand aired in the former country (the latter is getting the episode tonight), I tweeted that the spectacular failure of this twist is almost as predictable as Channel Seven's catastrophic revival of The Mole last year. The implication at the time was that I wasn't going to be writing up another post like this, but after some genuine curiosity and support I've changed my mind. (I know. You're shocked. Also, the last paragraph has task and location spoilers for upcoming episodes; skip it if you don't want to read that sort of thing.)

The Amazing Race has always been one of the great 'positive' reality shows, where your fate is entirely in your hands rather than at the behest of other players trying to fuck you over, overpaid hasbeen talent show judges, or the general public. But without the strategy or the audience influence, how do you make people want to watch? The obvious answer, and the one most seasons so far have used, is "make the show as good as possible and hope people have discerning taste". It's paid off - despite being a show about travel and having its first season air in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, the original version has won all but one Emmy in the 'best reality show' category since it was introduced shortly after the boom of reality television, the show has been franchised in over a dozen countries and is Baywatch-in-Germany big in several, and the previous season of this very franchise we're discussing won an International Emmy for its excellence. So, naturally, with the respect the show has internationally, Channel Seven have decided that they know better than the rest of the world and have instead decided to produce this third season in-house rather than use the experienced producers prior seasons had.

This is a massive double-edged sword. On the one hand, new producers make it far less likely we're going to have to sit through leg upon leg of tasks recycled from other Amazing Race franchises with the excuse that nobody could possibly have used this newfangled interweb thing to research or watch said other versions or could possibly have watched it while actually visiting another country, which is a massive plus. On the other, the pedigree of the previous season means there is going to be less than zero tolerance for inadequacy this time around, and by giving the season its "Australia vs. New Zealand" theme, it's as good as sunk before it even leaves the harbour.

Put simply, The Amazing Race as a show is all about combating xenophobia. The whole point of the show is for people to see and experience a world they would never otherwise be exposed to, and learning to appreciate it. That's the very reason why countries like China and India turn up in so many seasons, and why we rarely if ever get tasks referencing the negative aspects of countries - the only time I can remember the show coming unreasonably close to the Line was an episode in Dhaka, Bangladesh involving picking dead rats off the streets, and even then the focus was definitely on the efforts to make Dhaka cleaner rather than being all "Ewwww, RATS!" So to entrench xenophobia - even in the context of the alleged playful rivalry of the sort Australia and New Zealand have - as the entire theme of the season frankly just proves these particular producers are idiots who have no business being anywhere near this show. There really is no better way to put it. It's like they watched the second season and decided, "This is okayyyy, but you know what have would make it really good? More Kym and Donna!", when everyone else had already forgotten them two weeks after they quit.

But television is also a business, and to maximise your profits, you must also maximise the audience. That isn't going to happen either. The cross-section of society that likes this show tends to overlap with the same sort of person who hates this kind of shit, so you're going to lose a decent portion of those viewers. The cross-section of society that would be intrigued by the twist would be turned off by the actual concept of the show. Where you could have sold another Australian-only season to a variety of obscure cable channels around the world and made a decent profit for your investment, much the same way as many of the major American reality shows are sold internationally, the idea of having to explain a rivalry that doesn't even really exist beyond My Sheep Joke Is Funnier Than Your Kangaroo Joke is going to turn away potential buyers. Even if you play along and assume the show could possibly overcome all of these obvious disadvantages, the show has been delayed for so long that it's now airing directly after the Commonwealth Games, which in Australia at least aired on a different network and means that basically nobody who could possibly be sold on the idea is even aware the show has started yet because they were all too busy watching actual Australia vs. New Zealand competition and are probably by now thoroughly sick and tired of it.

All this, of course, assumes the show itself is as good as it always has been. (Your mileage may vary on how good it has been, between the obnoxiously terrible elimination order of season one and all the missing tasks of season two, but let's say it's been adequate at the very least.) Unfortunately, having now seen the first episode, it's fair to say it's not going to be. In the interests of fairness, the show has decided to cut the number of teams from eleven to ten - five per country - and yet, even with a two-hour premiere, fewer teams, and fewer and simpler tasks than the two previous season premieres, it still didn't feel like we had any chance to react positively to anybody. It's not the worst premiere an Amazing Race season has ever had (that title will perpetually belong to The Amazing Race 15's premiere, with a start-line elimination and several gratuitously-outdated Japanese stereotypes including a sadistic '80s-style game show), but it's probably pretty close to the bottom of the list. And when the last US season premiere felt fresher despite featuring a cast of returning contestants so poorly chosen the general audience reaction was disbelief that anybody could possibly have got it so wrong combined with bad recycled tasks in a country that's been done to death AND the twelfth Los Angeles-area start in thirteen seasons, there's not much more that can be said.

But why exactly was this premiere so stale and uninviting? It's not exactly as if there have been so many trips to the central Australia or South Island wells that they couldn't have sustained one more. There are quite a few reasons. Insisting on building up "Team Australia" and "Team New Zealand" meant brushing through the teams rather than introducing them properly, which led to the situation where viewers were practically compelled to support their own country in the opening tug-of-war task even though, as noted above, nobody watching this show was likely to give a shit. Using a tug-of-war as an opening task sapped all the excitement out of the race's start when instead of running for their first clues, players basically stood still and pulled a rope for a few minutes, with half of the teams being given an immediate time penalty for losing the contest. But hey, it's not as if we're trying to sell this as some kind of a race or anything. Having the teams head directly to the airport after the tug-of-war meant that they were basically split into the two available flights by country, all but eliminating any possible drama the twist could have possibly had beyond building resentment and making the season bitchy and unpleasant to watch. The tasks themselves - the lame and counterproductive tug-of-war, an overnight wait in Christchurch, then the most boring footage of whitewater rafting ever and a Road Block literally involving tractors and sheep, because nothing says excitement and high stakes quite like FARMING - left a lot to be desired and meant that without a Detour whoever sat out of the Road Block spent the entire leg just helping nine other people in a tug-of-war and not particularly paddling a raft very hard in terms of tasks. Even with two hours of airtime, none of the ten teams proved themselves to be particularly supportable regardless of which country you're from, the ethnically varied casting of the previous two seasons seems to have been replaced with White Pride and Two Token Maoris, and host Grant Bowler was faking his middling enthusiasm even more clearly than he was last season, complete with an explanation for the tug-of-war that was clearly written by whoever had made poor Shura Taft sound like a condescending nitwit on The Mole last year. Oh, goody.

And that's just in last night's episode. Now I know somebody will probably surmise - as at least one person has with one of my past posts - that I'm a failed auditionee who was so disillusioned by failing to make the cut that I'm taking my anger out on the show. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've never auditioned and I don't particularly have any burning desire to. And to be fair, as most of the tasks last night were explained they did feel promising. The twist of the start line not being the start line was genuinely surprising and undercut only by the way it was completely mishandled. Christchurch as the first location was a refreshing change from the tropical Asian islands of the first two seasons, except then it turned out that instead of a decent city leg with an air of earthquake-related defiance, we were going to be stuck in some generic rolling hills. Whitewater rafting is by far one of the better extreme sports activities that turn up every so often on the race, and then it was a complete and utter funsuck. The Road Block sounded genuinely brilliant - driving wacky vehicles around an obstacle course and dealing with unruly animals are recipes for success, and we had both in a single task - but on paper the first half was completely uninvolving and the second seemed dangerously close to animal cruelty the way the sheep were being handled. And then the big Lord of the Rings knockoff they were pushing throughout the episode - where you had to collect two halves of a matching ring to reveal the final clue - was a bust as the clue formed by the matching ring was so vague teams clearly got some additional information to help them narrow down "go west" to find the actual Pit Stop location.

But that's now all in the past, so what of the future? Most of the countries visited this season have already been spoiled, as have a few of the tasks, and while there are some good unexpected countries coming up, it doesn't seem as though the season will actually get any better. In fact, it's probably going to get worse. The preview for next week broke one of the fundamental rules of reality television and fixated on a local delicacy challenge, and while I admit "tarantulas in Cambodia" is nowhere near the level of Fear Factor's "horse rectum for the hell of it", showing that kind of challenge in a preview tends to actively drive away an audience. I get why the challenge is there, but even then local delicacy challenges make for mediocre television at the best of times, and expecting your audience to be excited for it is an unparalleled level of genre blindness. There are other major problems too, though. With The Amazing Race 22 having recently finished airing at the time this season was being planned and having generally been considered anywhere from underwhelming to shockingly atrocious, it should have been fresh in producers' minds how poorly it and its tasks were received, but two of the very worst - an opening needle-in-a-haystack task involving sandcastles and a Survivor-esque firemaking task inspired by bushmen - have been confirmed as appearing later this season, with the firemaking task taking place in a different country (but Africa is like totes all one homogenous wasteland, so it's not in the least bit offensive or something) and the luck challenge being recycled in the season finale. Yes. They're recycling a challenge so terrible three teams quit during a season premiere when they weren't all fatigued and hadn't really done anything yet as one of the last challenges of the entire season, at a point when players tend to be struggling to even stand up straight. Slow clap, show. Add to this schlepping all the way to Portugal for a task involving counting beach umbrellas, because Portugal doesn't have a rich and varied culture or history you could exploit, and doubling down on continuing to refuse to cast non-heterosexual contestants (for the third season in a row, with excuses given in the past that are about as homophobic as you can get without actually having a smackdown with equal rights lobbyists) by celebrating with a trip to exotic Russia, and there's really nothing so far that suggests it won't be the Worst Season Ever. Let's hope they manage to polish a turd, otherwise this show's chances of survival are in deep shit.

(Addendum: The show got just 588,000 viewers last night. Blog favourite The Mole was dumped in a late-night timeslot last year with 555,000.)

2013: Unlucky for Most

The year 2013 has, to put it politely, not been among the better years of the reality TV genre's existence. Sure, there were some definite highlights throughout the year, but the problem is there weren't enough of these shows and those that were honestly weren't high-profile enough to attract mainstream attention. I mean, how do you sell a show like The Genius: Rules of the Game to someone when the basic concept is "South Korean celebrities (who aren't Psy) compete against each other for money in strategy-based cocktail party games"? Or Canada's Greatest Know-It-All, whose two main problems are right there in the title? Or The Great Australian Bake Off, which seemed to make a point of being the cooking-themed reality show for people who hate cooking-themed reality shows?

That last one might be comparatively easy to sell, especially for a new show, but it's surprising how few of the long-running reality shows managed to dish up enjoyable entries this year. In fact, aside from maybe Project Runway successfully fixing something we didn't even realise was broken, it's been one disastrous production decision after another this year, to the point where it wasn't hard at all to come up with this list of thirteen of the year's stupidest decisions. It's probably not too surprising that nearly half of the list comes from Australian reality shows, and five come from various versions of Big Brother, but... you know. If these shows were better, that probably wouldn't be the case.

#13 The Mole (Netherlands): Episode 6

This year's Dutch season of The Mole, filmed on location in South Africa, took a while to get going. While much of the issue there isn't entirely the show's fault - one player got seriously injured after a freak accident in a challenge the week before a planned non-elimination twist and had to be removed from the game to recover, making the season feel as though it was moving at a glacial pace when there wasn't a proper elimination for three episodes (not that anybody would try that deliberately or anything) - even once the show got moving again it was hard to care that much until we got down to the final four. Episode 6 was the first episode following this meandering section, and though it featured three challenges to keep it moving at a swift pace, the problem is all of them were beyond awful. Given the goal of the show is to win money while working out who is trying to lose money, it seemed like a bizarre decision to have two consecutive challenges that didn't involve money at all and ultimately didn't affect anything, followed by a challenge where only one player had any role in winning money at all. It doesn't help in the slightest that the non-cash, non-exemption challenges are invariably the worst of whichever season they are in, and as a result a show which had a good but not spectacular opening episode didn't start to feel like the Mole of old until about the eighth episode 8 of a ten episode season, where the final episode was a reunion and clipshow. Sigh.

#12 The Biggest Loser (Australia): The Fridge

Still, at least the above production decision only affected one episode. The latest game addition to completely fail on Australia's version of The Biggest Loser managed to suck most of the fun out of the show. Having been incredibly unpopular during its original incarnation as 'The Walk', where the winner of a challenge got to randomly pick one of four similar variations of the week's twist and had to deal with the consequences, I'm still not sure months later why they would revive it while removing the one mildly tolerable part about it, that there was some way to affect the result. Here, with the Fridge, there was only one twist and the team who lost the most weight the previous week had to decide whether to take reveal it themselves or give the responsibility to someone else. Which would be bad enough, except that out of six times the twist appeared (it didn't show up in the first week and the standard gimmick weeks later in the season meant there was no time), the twist of the week only had an impact on the game three times. Complete and utter waste of time.

#11 Big Brother (Canada): Too Many Cooks

Having watched and been annoyed by the Americans continually fucking up Big Brother beyond all recognition, the Canadians finally got in on the act this year. And while the show wasn't bad, in that it went about as well as a fusion of the bastardised American format and the original format could have gone without becoming unrecognisable to its audience, there still seemed to be a lot they didn't understand about the show. It was great to finally see the concept of secret missions (a staple of the format internationally) make its way to North America, and to see the return of an official Big Brother voice onscreen, even if only in a minor role. BUT. I'm not sure we needed a mock payphone in the store room to give players secret missions in the Big Brother voice PLUS a talking ornamental moose head in the Diary Room airlock when they both serve the same function and when they could have just given missions in the Diary Room itself and called "one player" when they didn't care who had to complete the task. Indeed, when the phone was first used in the season premiere, the player who answered was sent to the Diary Room to get the rules for their task anyway, so what was the damn point? I know it's a small issue, but it's one that could have and should have been thought about in more depth.

#10 Big Brother (UK): The People's Puppet

Meanwhile, the British version of the same show has been well-known for years for testing the limits of its format, with many iconic Big Brother twists appearing there first (though ironically the three most iconic additions to the basic format were all introduced on the Australian version, which generally speaking would find it hard to copy more from the Brits without actually flying its host in every year). This year's opening twist came in two parts - a split launch over two nights, which has been done before elsewhere, and an actor entering the house for the first week pretending to be a genuine player while acting in accordance with the results of polls on the show's website. We've had real players be forced to take on the role of an insider in the past (most notably in the US, where it was used as a surrogate for not giving the audience the power to evict), but here where a professional actor was used it just didn't work. Part of it may have been the actor just couldn't get the mix of emotions right and came across forced a lot of the time, part of it may have been that he wasn't likable enough for us to get behind, part of it may have been that the fake twist invented to give him the power needed for the twist to work seemed like it would have been much better with a genuine player, and part of it may have been that having this player make the week's only nominations essentially made it so the audience got a free shot at whoever they wanted (though this was nicely mirrored in the subsequent celebrity edition where they were told the nominees were selected by the audience but were actually selected by some players who had been hidden elsewhere in the compound). Whatever the case, this is one twist that should NEVER be repeated.

#9 Big Brother (US): MVP

Oh, American Big Brother producers. So consistently abysmal it's a wonder there isn't a drinking game. This time around, the version's big twist was that while the winner of a challenge got to select two nominees as usual, the audience got to select somebody to pick a third nominee. And if you're thinking that doesn't sound so bad and what's the problem isn't this a show where audience interaction is good, I'd agree with you. Except for one minor thing. Three of the previous four seasons featured at least one returning player with a decently-sized fanbase, and while this season didn't, it did feature the sister of a player who has appeared twice on this show and once on The Amazing Race, giving her enough of a head start to sweep the poll every week she was in the house. Producers realised the problem early and made a blatant attempt to fix the issue, by making the audience its own MVP and having them directly pick the third nominee, but they didn't realise that while the former player in question was popular with a sizable part of the audience, they are incredibly divisive and there are just as many people who hate her with the passion of a thousand gurning nuns, allowing those people to automatically nominate the sister every week. The twist was finally scrapped for good when it was realised it was never going to work, but they really should have noticed the incredibly obvious problem beforehand.

#8 Celebrity Big Brother (UK): Rylan Clark's casting

Speaking of huge fanbases. What do you get when you put a very popular current singer in a glorified popularity contest with such comparable celebrities as, um, Toadie from Neighbours and a woman who was in a cheesy pop band in the late 1990s? (Nothing against Steps, who were awesome at the time, but COME ON.) It turns out the answer is "a boring season of Celebrity Big Brother in which the only people who don't act like the result is a foregone conclusion and therefore don't try to be entertaining are a pair of obnoxious American imports who probably weren't even aware how the show works". Say what you will about a British show casting the awfulness that is Speidi, but at least they weren't popular enough in the UK for it to matter too much (see also: Heidi "My cousin invented The Bachelor" Fleiss, who finished eleventh out of twelve in 2010). Meanwhile, Rylan is now hosting a Big Brother spinoff discussion show, so I'm sure the result wasn't predetermined at all.

#7 Masterchef (Australia): Weekly Themes

We've all heard the phrase "don't fix what ain't broke" before. And this is one of two cases this year where the end result could be used as evidence in a court of law. In the past, Masterchef Australia has been quite content to experiment with its format while retaining enough familiarity that you could forgive them the occasional misstep. This season, all of that goodwill evaporated within seconds once the preseason commercials using derogatory stereotypes to sell a "battle of the sexes" theme started. It was so bad that it made headlines on major international blogs, with Huffington Post calling it "a new low for sexism" among the cafailcade of criticism. And yet, sadly, that wasn't the biggest problem in the season, nor was the bit where they neglected to mention that the gender divide was only the first of several weekly themes designed to make each week stand out (though certainly they both played a huge role in the season's low ratings). The biggest issue was that the themes selected didn't lend themselves to interesting challenge design, leading to a series of dull and repetitive team challenges followed by gimmicky elimination challenges, which in turn caused the mediocre cooks who would normally have struggled to make it through Top 50 Week (scrapped for this season) to make it far too far into the competition, and which resulted in someone being eliminated despite having the best dish of the day simply because their partner didn't pull their weight. Hell, in the FINAL we had someone end up with a raw chicken dish and attempt to serve it after lightly browning the sides to hide how obviously undercooked it was. And she got an average score of 7/10 for the dish. Unfuckingbelievable.

Incidentally, if you don't believe me regarding the challenges being gimmicky, these were all actual concepts this year:

• 'Italy's flag is red, white, and green. Cook a dish using only food in one of these colours.'

• 'In pairs, make two identical copies of the same dish while being separated by a wall and unable to see what your partner is doing.'

• 'Our sponsors Qantas fly all over the world. Here are a series of ingredient-laden tables arranged like a map of the world, cook a dish using only ingredients on one "continent".'

• 'Kids like to play games. Cook a dish using ingredients collected from the pantry while it is pitch black.'

• 'Fast food is fast and all, but actually going to buy it takes too damn long. Cook fried chicken, souvlaki, and a burger with the lot before one of the judges is able to buy it all and come back.'

There is not enough derp in the world, you guys.

#6 The Mole (Australia): Soap Opera Edition

Look, I've been there and said it already. Moving on, shall we?

#5 Dancing with the Stars (Australia): Double Play

Even when the Dancing with the Stars casting department takes 'stars' more as a suggestion than as an actual requirement, it's still possible to enjoy and appreciate how the non-stars' dancing ability improves over time. But this season, Channel Seven left it too late to bring the show back, forcing them to schedule the show two nights a week in order to finish the season before the summer non-ratings period kicks in. Not only does this limit our opportunity to watch the non-stars develop over time in that the season is several weeks shorter, but having them lose most of their practice time in the tight schedule also means they genuinely won't improve as much because they're too busy trying to learn several dances each week to get any of them to a decent level. If the situation ever arises again in future - and let's hope to the deity of our choice it doesn't - they need to just have a smaller cast instead. From a show that started so well, it's honestly surprising this isn't the final nail in the coffin.

#4 The Amazing Race (US, Canada): Double Express Pass

The Amazing Race was once one of those shows where the focus was entirely on teams' merit rather than luck or how well they interacted with the other teams. Since about season five, however, we've been forced to deal with several similar twists that treat inter-team relations as a key part of the show, while simultaneously losing the part of the show where how teams interact with non-taxi-driving locals affects their performance. In addition, the leg design has now reached a point where everything is spoonfed and all that really matters is how well you do in the various tasks, with the travel elements mostly falling by the wayside. And the tasks themselves are timed to within an inch of their life to boot, with most not featuring much of a chance for players to fall too far ahead or behind. In season seventeen, a new twist was added where the winners of the first leg got an 'Express Pass', which basically allows them the option of skipping any one task they are having trouble with without penalty, simply by forfeiting the pass. It somehow escaped producers' minds when planning this twist that the pass amounted to glorified quitting on a show that's supposed to be about merit, making it feel undeserved whenever it is used (and it has been present in all seven seasons since it was introduced), especially when the season premieres are now traditionally underwhelming in design because WE CAN'T MAKE THEM WORK HARD FOR A MILLION BUCKS. Or something. In both of this year's US seasons, and in the Canadian version which aired in the months in between, an additional twist was added where the winners of the first leg got one Express Pass for themselves and a second they had to give to another team. In short, it is now possible and entirely within the show's rules to quit a task without penalty, without having to do anything to earn it beyond not being a raging asshole in comparison to other teams. Why was this twist even allowed out of the planning phase?

#3 Survivor (US): Redemption Island + Loved One Switches

Four words that strike fear into the heart of every Survivor fan: "Executive Producer Jeff Probst". He's been running the show from the host's chair since season twenty-one a few years ago, and in that time he's seen the show's audience dip from an average of 12.25 million viewers to an average of just 9.6 million. That can't be explained solely by audience fatigue, since the show has been on for nearly fifteen years and ratings were fairly consistent before he took over, which means there has to be something else going on to impact the ratings. In those seasons we've seen an avalanche of failed twists, including but not limited to countering the problems of an 'old versus young' team division by adding a token that allows a team to take an advantage in a challenge, without realising that it becomes pointless once the fit young team gets the advantage, making both teams live on the same beach but dividing them by gender to ensure they remain segregated anyway, and the infamous Redemption Island, where the show's entire pacing was thrown out the window by allowing players who were voted out by their teams to compete in sudden-death challenges to try and win their way back into the game. It turns out all those years of 'fire represents life' were bullshit and 'the tribe has spoken' means nothing if you were wearing invisible headphones, apparently. And this season it's gotten even worse, with players coming into the game with pre-existing relationships with a person on the other team. Now, if you are voted out you can escape Redemption Island immediately by switching teams with your partner and having them take your place. So not only can you (1) get voted out of the game and have it mean absolutely nothing at all, but (2) you can get eliminated from the game without being medevaced or quitting and without getting a single vote against you, if you switch with your partner and lose a challenge. Not surprisingly, but very hilariously, this happened at the first available opportunity to the player Probst was undoubtedly hoping would dominate the season in spite of his not being great at challenges or at the social game. Oh, the irony.

#2 Big Brother (Australia): Strategic Nominations

The basic idea of nominations in the Australian version of Big Brother is that you get five points each week, and you have to allocate them to the two people you want to get rid of, and whoever gets the most points will face a public phone vote to determine who is eliminated. Traditionally players have been forced to make these nominations for personality only, but in recent years the option to nominate for strategic reasons has been added, although discussing nominations with other players is still strictly forbidden. This year, one week of nominations was held with players specifically told that they had to nominate for strategic reasons only. Reading between the lines, you can already see the boneheadedness of this decision. If you are a player in this situation the only possible strategy you can have is to nominate the people you believe are popular in the outside world, hoping to eliminate your biggest competition before you end up in a vote against them, and the only way you can guess who is most popular is to pick the people who are most entertaining in the house. In essence, getting about 45 seconds of bored non-surprise from players who don't care that much who goes as long as it isn't them is apparently enough payoff for the small cost of basically forcing the elimination of one one of the most entertaining players in the season. This twist is such a stupid idea that it's frankly not enough to guarantee it will never be used again. The producer responsible for it needs to be fired from the show. Immediately.

#1 The Biggest Loser (Australia): Trainers Vote

Though this final idea is easily the worst of the year, it's also certainly in tight competition to be the single worst production idea in the show's history. Basically, The Biggest Loser is a televised fat camp, and each week the players who lose the lowest percentage of their body weight face a vote with the other players deciding who gets eliminated. Early in this year's Australian season, a twist was introduced where the other teams played no role in the vote and the three personal trainers had to vote instead. Or, at least, that was the plan, until the trainers in question unanimously decided to abstain. It's bad enough when players refuse to go along with wacky twists. But when people who get paid to work on your show refuse? You've got serious problems.

Firing On All Cylinders, Volume II: The Amazing Race, Original Recipe

Earlier this year, I dissected the Australian version of The Amazing Race and pointed out exactly why it wasn't working. Now, with the main version itself having found itself in a rut as big as the Grand Canyon or some other less impressive hugeass hole they would actually visit in a non-Family-Edition season, it's time to take on a bigger challenge: Can I explain why The Amazing Race hasn't been consistently good in about ten seasons without resorting to "I don't like change! Change it back!"? This time, only seven points, but more detail.

Cylinder The First: Less Monotonous Route Planning

This section... really, actual facts here could do this particular section more justice than any amount of argument:

• In the first twenty-one seasons of The Amazing Race, fifteen - over two-thirds - of them have visited some combination of Japan, China, and Taiwan. Only six haven't. And five of those six happened before either Japan or Taiwan had been visited for the first time. To put it another way: The much-maligned Family Edition (which I'm counting as one of the six) aired in 2005. Only one season in the seven years since has avoided the three countries.
• Add India, the other major Asian staple country, to the above trio and it becomes even more startling - four of the six seasons that skipped the trio visited India, meaning that in the entire history of The Amazing Race, only two seasons out of twenty-one have skipped India, China, Taiwan, and Japan. And the closest one of those two seasons came to leaving continental North America was swimming to a buoy off the Costa Rican shoreline.
• Six of the last ten seasons have had clues in either Germany or the Netherlands. Three of the remaining four have had multiple legs in Russia. The only season that didn't go to any of the three? It went to three other countries that have German as an official language - Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland.
• In the last ten seasons, if the race has gone anywhere in Africa it has been for exactly two legs in a single country. We haven't had either multiple African countries or a single leg in any African country since The Amazing Race: All-Stars in 2007.
• The race has visited Thailand five times, and the foreign versions have visited the country four times. When visiting Thailand, the race has never skipped Bangkok.
• There has never been a visit to South America that skipped both Brazil and Argentina.
• With the exception of the Family Edition, no season has skipped Asia, and the race has spent at least four legs in the continent in every season since 2007.
• In the first eleven seasons, only three seasons started in Los Angeles. In the ten seasons since, all but one started there... and the one that didn't ENDED there.

Cylinder the Second: Fire the Casting Directors

It has become commonplace on this show - and on CBS stablemate Survivor, whose casting is run by the same people - to see people who can best be described as G-list celebrities on the show. But the show's casting at this point is so far beyond ridiculous, ridiculous is thinking of sending out a team of sherpas. Dozens of models and national-level beauty queens (including a former Miss America). Youtube 'celebrities'. Two members of the Chippendales. A former Dawson's Creek writer. One of Ryan Seacrest's ex-girlfriends (I know, right?). Stars from at least five different reality shows, including five separate Big Brother contestants and four from Survivor. NFL cheerleaders, NFL wives, and a Major League Baseball coach. A Nashville songwriter, and a former Megadeth guitarist. Two separate teams of circus clowns. Professional athletes in soccer, gridiron, beach volleyball, bullriding, lumberjacking, and snowboarding, PLUS two of the Harlem Globetrotters. And that's not even all of them. To make matters worse, they've actively (and from what I can tell, illegally) ignored the "You must be 21 years of age to apply" restriction on at least three occasions, casting a twenty-year-old and two nineteen-year-olds. (None of whom, it's worth noting, were particularly good racers.) The casting of low-level celebrities has now reached a point where, basically, actual people who aren't filling the role of "token redneck hick team" have nearly no chance and need not apply.

To put it another way, would any of the iconic, still hugely popular teams from the early seasons - teams like Nancy and Emily, Ken and Gerard, Linda & Karen, or even the infamous Team Guido who basically put this show on the map - make it past the first round of auditions now? I don't think so. So why the hell do the casting people consider a 'celebrity' team like season 21's Ryan and Abbie so much better? He wasn't even on the (inexplicably) popular version of The Apprentice. He was on the one that regifted BETHENNY FRANKEL to the world. (NOTE: No, that is NOT an invitation to invite Omarosa onto the show.)

Now either America somehow conveniently figured this out after the first few seasons they overloaded with models and stopped applying en masse, in which case the casting people need to be fired and replaced for allowing such a situation to happen, or viewers are still applying for the show and the casting people are simply ignoring their videos, in which case they need to be fired for gross incompetence. Their entire job is to look at applications. Do they seriously believe there are fewer than eleven worthy applications in a pool of, let's be conservative, twenty thousand? Bullshit.

And why can't we get anybody with any actual foreign language abilities who isn't a Token Asian Team? Seeing a pair of Italian teachers (who also spoke fluent French) on the Australian version earlier this year really hammered home that American audiences are expected to celebrate uncultured boors. It's been basically eight seasons since someone bothered to learn simple words in foreign languages instead of bemoaning the fact that people don't speak English the world over.

Cylinder the Third: Make the Race Exhausting Again

It's not just imagination that says the race is getting easier. In the ten years competitive reality shows have had a separate "best show" category at the Emmy Awards, this show has won nine times. The first year the show won - in the inaugural 2003 contest - the season 3 episode submitted contained a late-night drive through the German countryside, digging through a giant haystack to find a hidden clue, collecting a cluebox from the middle of a waterfall, not one but two long-distance train trips, a surprisingly brutal Detour involving Swiss banking, recreating the legend of William Tell, and a high-altitude hike that left one of the fittest women in the show's history gasping for breath at the mat, all with only twelve hours of rest at the previous Pit Stop before the leg began. And it was a non-elimination!

After that leg, there were another five before the end of the race. Now let's cut to season twenty, the most recent season to finish airing. Again, the sixth-last leg of the season was a non-elimination at high altitude. But once the opening flights of the leg were out of the way (having travelled from Azerjaben Abzerj from Baku), the alleged tasks consisted of a short downhill bike ride, a Detour that amounted to throwing a stick or jumping in place for one minute, and pitching a tent. That's the entire leg. No self-driving, no Road Block, no additional route markers or tasks, and the Pit Stop was right next to the tents. It's perhaps worth noting that the only submitted episode that did not win the Emmy was only marginally more difficult than this - driving to a bakery and buying a baguette, a lopsided Detour where only the stupid and/or U-Turned teams would have taken the task that didn't boil down to "crawl across a small field", and riding bikes to the Pit Stop.

Having a Road Block and a Detour on every leg including the premiere and finale, and probably additional tasks as well, is definitely in the best interests of the show. Not only does it make the legs more exhausting for the teams, it will also help fill episodes with more than just the usual flight sequences and petty squabbles. It's not a coincidence the final leg of The Amazing Race 12 is generally considered the best of the last ten finales - it's the only one with both a Detour and a Road Block shown. The addition of two-Road-Block legs from season 16 kind of helps, but until they catch up by having several legs with two Detours - or indeed simply put a Detour in those legs - it's going to come across as blatant cost-cutting when money could be more efficiently saved in so many other places.

I'm going to cover "better tasks, please" later on, but in these legs with either a Detour or a Road Block but not both, the crux of the problem are the two reasons they started to cut tasks away to begin with: The show's decreased budget (due to cutting two of the non-elimination episodes for season 12, though one was re-added two seasons later), and the desire to 'surprise' teams. The latter is quicker and easier to debunk, so I'll just point out that surprising contestants with your ability to make halfassed legs isn't a good thing, and return to the former. The first four seasons hardly had an earth-shattering budget, sticking mostly to established tourist haunts (after Namibia, the least touristy of the remaining countries visited during this time period is probably Portugal) and tasks with minimal props, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who's watched since the start and thinks what we have now is an improvement of any kind.

Also, while I'm on the subject: None of these ridiculously easy 'warm-up' legs at the start of a race. Start wearing them down early. But fixing the halfassed leg design is only half of the problem. Returning to twelve-hour Pit Stops wherever safe, with the occasional thirty-six hour extended Pit Stop to stop the crew from keeling over or to help Phil stay ahead of teams, would also help enormously. As stupid as letting teams go in the middle of the night only to bunch them at the first location of the leg sounds, letting the teams race outside of business hours (and not just for a random night leg) actually does make the show feel more amazing. In addition, the likely 'wait until this place opens in the morning' bunching also stops teams from getting too far ahead or too far behind. A longer Pit Stop just means teams are less tired in the latter part of the race and less likely to encounter the 'Killer Fatigue' phenomenon that led to many an entertainingly stupid racing decision in the early seasons - which also means position changes are far less likely in a leg without bunching, essentially making the entire episode an anticlimax. Why is the current approach considered better?

Cylinder the Fourth: Eat, Sleep, and Mingle

In season 14, the producers thought teams were getting along too well with each other, and decided to sequester them separately during rest periods, simultaneously withholding food during Pit Stops in order to cause more fights. Not surprisingly, it and the following two seasons had some of the most unbearably unpleasant bickering in the show's history. The question needs to be asked: In what universe is having a bunch of toxic assholes bitching about people they barely know a good way to attract viewers? Don't get me wrong, dysfunction is okay in moderation. But in the current situation, it's borderline impossible for any relationship - functional or otherwise - to form between teams during the race. Aside from one quick conversation between two of the non-performers at a Road Block in Denmark in season 19 (which resulted in the heretofore unshown development that Cindy - part of the final six at that point, and one of the season's eventual winners - had a snarky sense of humour), when was the last time teams were shown actually speaking civilly towards each other?

Do you want an actual, recent, non-hypothetical example of how this approach doesn't work? Fine. Who was more popular: Carol and Brandy from season 16, who were one-note and seemed to hate everyone and everything that was happening, or Brook and Claire from season 17, who were also one-note but bordered on Flanders-level enjoyment of everyone and everything they encountered? Exactly.

Cylinder the Fifth: Scripting, Editing, and Everybody's Favourite Non-Hobbit, Non-Xena Kiwi

Again, just a series of quick dot points. Not really enough to build entire paragraphs around, but also not small enough to ignore if we're serious about improving the show.

• Show every team departing every Pit Stop, regardless of whether they'll all end up together, even if you have to show six teams reading the clue in a montage.
• Don't assume everybody's seen the show before. You still need to spend four seconds explaining what a Detour and a Road Block are, the same way you have to explain the Fast Forward and the Speed Bump and the U-Turn every time they appear.
• Stop writing bad puns for the task descriptions. Phil clearly doesn't enjoy saying them, and it's only taking time away from explaining the tasks properly. If a Detour is "a choice between two tasks, each with its own pros and cons", explain what the pros and cons are.
• If you're going to spend the time explaining how tasks are culturally relevant, do a quick (for example) "In this Detour, teams must choose between two common local forms of transportation", not a thirty second rant about how boats are relevant to the culture of NORWAY.
• Phil, tone it down a little. The tasks really aren't that exciting, and haven't been for years.
• While you're at it, stop with the non-elimination fakeout questions. It's a huge giveaway that you're not going to eliminate a team when... you know, YOU DON'T ELIMINATE THEM.
• Use the greeter pronounciations for cities and countries. In season 21, Phil managed to mispronounce two cities and a country, meaning that for five weeks in a row he got it wrong. Common errors or not (and the Bangladesh error in particular is basically mainstream), that's just inexcusable.
• Tell us how far teams are travelling overland again. It doesn't come across that, for example, the season 20 driving from the start line to the airport and from their arrival in Argentina to the first cluebox was a total of about 500 kilometres. And no: Telling us a city is X hours away does nothing when for all we know they could be measuring time by pogo stick.
• Choose a style and stick with it. The new fonts and graphics for every task make it look like a student film. A bad student film.
• The rapid zoom-outs at every Pit Stop are no longer entertaining, and kind of function to show how insignificant the show is when you're contrasting the tiny check-in mat with the monument du jour. Tilting the camera down to close-up on the mat's world map design worked far better.
• Stop playing favourites. No theme music to get us to like the teams you spent a lot of money recruiting for the show.
• For the love of God, Buddha, Allah, Ganesh, L. Ron Hubbard, and Oprah, don't dumb it down for viewers. We don't need the splitscreens to tell us teams are racing at the same time. We don't need the idiot chimes to tell us when they're idiots. Just tell us about the locations instead of comparing them to America.
• The wacky graphics and music whenever they're in far-eastern Asia have GOT to GO. Would any of the graphics used in recent seasons (the cartoon dragon in Japan, the "wrong!" gong in Taiwan, and the laughing-kid-on-a-table-tennis-bat in China) have gotten past the censors if it was suggested for, say, Canada? Spain? New Zealand? No. Every time they appear, I'm not just ashamed to be watching, I'm ashamed the show is still allowed on the air. They're that derogatory.

Cylinder the Sixth: Better Tasks, Please

(See? I told you so.)

There are two very simple rules that should always be followed when designing challenges for reality TV shows. Firstly, make them easy to explain but hard to complete. Secondly, if they aren't related to either the culture of the filming location or to the basic concept of the show, they aren't going to be a good task. Simple rules, right? And yet, this is probably the main reason the Race doesn't feel as Amazing any more. Despite everything I've said so far, it really doesn't matter how good the cast is (though obviously a watchable cast is preferred, so DON'T IGNORE EVERYTHING ABOVE). If the tasks and/or twists aren't worth writing home about, 95% of the time the season is already dead in the water. And the tasks haven't been great since about halfway through The Amazing Race 17.

Look at how The Amazing Race 19 turned out. An above average cast, with the best route in years (four totally new countries, including three that have been glaringly absent from earlier routes, two countries getting only a second visit, and Thailand, which all things considered compares pretty favourably to the other 'semi-regular' countries), and yet it already isn't remembered too fondly. Why not? Quite simply, it's because the tasks are crap. A lame twist in the opening episode that promised a "rolling effect" throughout the race but which delivered nothing. An even lamer twist in the second episode that only serves to boot one of the designated woobie teams far earlier than intended. Yet another random-luck starting challenge disguised as an observation task to fool idiots. Four separate legs without a shown Detour (though to be fair, one of them was a replacement leg after the original location became unsafe). Four separate Road Blocks that are the same basic "memorise this, then go over there and repeat it exactly" task in different guises (Taiwan telephone, Thailand temple, Denmark quote, Atlanta typing). The rich and vibrant culture of Indonesia being reduced to mall parking lots in its first ever leg. A long-distance bus ride bunch after the final major task of the leg. The just as rich and just as vibrant culture of Belgium being cut to Van Damme, waffles, and product placement tasks for both a car company and a movie. A bunch of tasks throughout the season that are needlessly complicated. And then to wrap it all up, the easiest season-memory task in the show's history, and the removal of one of the final remaining elements of the show's identity: clueboxes (which, while not technically a task, need to be brought back). Doesn't seem so surprising now, does it?

And the two seasons since haven't been much of an improvement. The current season in particular has been woefully designed. Usually, it's a good idea to vary the landscape on this show every episode or two (as evidenced by the approximately seventeen-week-long section of the Family Edition where they drove through the western United States). The first five weeks of this season were basically spent in Asian urban centres - Shanghai, Surabaya, Bangil, and two legs in Dhaka. It was about as exciting as it sounds, especially when you consider the two Indonesian cities and Dhaka have much the same kind of landscape and the four legs were filled with generic 'manual labour' tasks that could literally have been done in nearly any city on the planet with only minor adaptations. So when the sixth leg starts with a cluebox on the European side of the Bosphorus in Istanbul and the instructions "travel back to Asia", my (and I suspect many others') instant reaction wasn't so much "HA! WHAT A FUNNY TRICK LOL!1!!1!1!" as it was "Fuck that shit." At the very least, they could have travelled to the countryside just outside any of the cities in question, and tested the teams' capabilities in a slightly different environment.

The tasks don't even really need to be that complicated. Why does the Fast Forward need to be some big time-consuming stunt that costs so much there can only be one or two in a season? Couldn't the Fast Forward just be a cryptic clue leading to a local landmark, where they have to find a specific person to win it? It would allow you to have more and make the episodes more unpredictable in the process.

Cylinder the Seventh: Non-Eliminations and Speed Bumps

Seriously, there's no point to penalising a team in a non-elimination when there's no bunching in the next leg and the time difference is already enough to send them home. It's counterproductive to have Speed Bumps (or any other penalties) when the damage has already been done due to the leg's poor design. Obviously a better leg design is needed. But even with that, can't we spend the extra 45 seconds reserved for the task on showing more actual racing, and let the fact they're already trailing the other teams be enough of a penalty? I don't believe it's coincidental that since the Speed Bump penalty was introduced, far and away the single best episode following a non-elimination was the one in season 17 (in Russia) where the penalty wasn't applied at all following production issues in the previous leg. The penalty just isn't anywhere near as great as the producers seem to think.

Also, scrap the idea of first-leg non-eliminations. They just ruin whatever momentum the show was building up during the premiere, and are a complete and total anticlimax in that circumstance. Early non-eliminations are fine, but... no. If you want one early, at least wait until the second episode.

Firing On All Cylinders, Volume I: The Amazing Race Australia

In this new column, I'll be dissecting a particular "broken" franchise of a reality show, and try to come up with a few basic ideas that could be used to help fix some of the glaring issues. Sometimes, the shows may have already been cancelled and the ideas are things which would need to be improved for a possible yet unlikely relaunch, but most of the time the shows are current attempts which are struggling to get out of first gear. This time: The Amazing Race Australia. We're only in our second season (a few weeks away from finishing), and at this point there would need to be a footrace to the Finish Line in order for the season to go down as anything better than "mediocre". Considering the franchise's first season is probably one of the five best Amazing Race seasons worldwide, it's a steep, sharp decline. So how has so much gone wrong so quickly? And what can producers do to make the show fire on all cylinders again?

Cylinder The First: Stop Recycling Tasks
As the production company which is responsible for this show also runs two other franchises - the regional Amazing Race Asia and the Israeli franchise HaMerotz LaMillion - it's entirely understandable that ActiveTV wants to capitalise on their past experience. Really, it is. Occasionally. But certainly not to the extent they've gone to. To this date, there have been twenty-one legs of the race. And I figure within that amount, maybe six or seven with recycled tasks would be reasonable, regardless of whether this show visited the same countries. But how many legs have there actually been with recycled tasks? EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. Quite often there's multiple copied tasks in a single leg, to the point where it's clear producers are brazenly self-plagiarising and expecting viewers not to know, since their other franchises haven't yet been shown in Australia. If only there was some sort of freely available way of finding out information. Like, say, the internet. Both other franchises have been freely available online in the past and have quite a few Australian fans, and all Amazing Race franchises have Wikipedia pages detailing tasks. So long story short is it's not too hard to realise producers are bludging on originality. Even the contestants themselves are noticing - when on their way to a Fast Forward involving modelling nude for an art class (taken from HaMerotz LaMillion), one team postulated the task was getting a tattoo (which has been done multiple times). What makes it even worse is that it's been confirmed executive producer Michael McKay actively stopped SBS from buying the rights to show both versions, and that quite a few tasks were taken from The Amazing Race: Unfinished Business, the last full season to air in Australia before the race started filming. It's like they don't even WANT to try. But they should. I don't know what it is, but it seems like the leg design is improved immeasurably when they use original tasks. Maybe it's because The Amazing Race Asia copied so much to begin with, or because HaMerotz LaMillion always erred on the side of lameness to avoid cultural issues with its complex audience demographics, but... really, this franchise is second only to the original in terms of scope. It's time to start acting like it.

Cylinder The Second: Stop Editing Shit Out (Corollary: Have Longer Episodes)
Last season, the show kept changing between one-hour episodes and ninety-minute episodes seemingly at random, leading to complaints from the audience when the changes weren't advertised. As a result, this season Seven decreed that after the ninety-minute premiere all episodes were to be one-hour episodes. Which would be great, if someone had told the producers before the season. The legs were clearly designed for ninety-minute episodes, and the lost time means a number of tasks have clearly been edited out. Consider this: In the entire twenty-season history of the American version, there have been at least seven Detours and Road Blocks edited out completely, and at most nine. Occasionally if all the teams pick the same Detour task (season 19's "bodybuilding routine" task) or if the Road Block is a particularly pedestrian replacement task (season 8's "climb the world's largest office chair" task), they'll just make it appear as a regular task, although they'll at least still show the task. Just to reiterate: Nine tasks maximum. In twenty seasons. In the first seven episodes of this season alone, there were at least four, probably five:

• A speculative Road Block in Manila, the Philippines, based solely on weird timing issues - 6:20pm arrival in the city, two short taxi rides and a fairly quick "gross food" challenge, and yet multiple teams are struggling to make a charter bus at 1:30am? Bullshit.
• A Road Block in Delhi, India, right at the very end of the leg - positioning changes significantly between the final shown task and the Pit Stop, with several all-male teams rising and an all-female team falling, and between obvious audio cuts and cuts to the clue (even highlighted once in a montage by cutting from a male voice to a female voice at the crucial moment) it's clear there's something missing.
• A quick Detour in Jaipur, right before the first Road Block of the leg, which I can confirm was a copy of the "walk across hot coals" or "lay on beds of nails for ten minutes" choice Norway's race had at the exact same location, and which had its yellow clue shown during a commercial.
• A Road Block in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, directly after the wave machine task - one team is even shown holding the clue, and given the wave machine's location and the next are basically on the same central road (as many Dubai landmarks are), the navigational difficulties that caused a team to quit the race are completely nonsensical unless it was a bitch to find.
• An apparently VERY time-consuming Detour in Havana, Cuba, immediately upon arrival - despite the leaders arriving at 3:10pm, and sunset being at 5:45pm, it somehow takes all of them until well after dark to drive from the airport to their stated next destination, which Google Maps puts at a jaw-dropping nineteen minutes away on a pretty straight route; and one team claims to have been driving for "six hours" at a point where the episode as shown has them completing just that short drive and an even shorter one. If the first unexplained time gap was bullshit, this is a month's worth of elephant manure.

And that's even once you consider it took nine weeks to see a single cluebox, with teams apparently going from task to task to task to Pit Stop. It's great they've picked an episode length and have stuck to it, but they've clearly chosen the wrong episode length. Every episode this season - including those that have had all their major tasks shown - could have benefited immensely from an extra half an hour running time.

Cylinder The Third: Stop Casting And Promoting The Show So Fucking Poorly
On paper, this cast looked dreadful, with so many clones of racing archetypes we were tired of eight years ago. Fighting dating couple? Chauvinist with female partner? Perky blonde cheerleaders? Bland parent-child team? "Disability" team who won't shut up about it and race? Incompetent alpha males? We had 'em all, plus a pale imitation of a team we had last year, leaving just two cannon-foddery all-female teams who clearly were cast for comic relief and a team of Aboriginal guys clearly cast as a response to criticism last year was "too white". Naturally, guess which three teams finished last in the first three legs? Frankly, the producers are lucky the first leg became a non-elimination (more on that later), because the team who got saved is turning out to be a viable contender for Most Fun Team Ever. If they hadn't been saved, this season would have turned into an even bigger chore to watch than The Amazing Race: All-Stars.

The other issue is the advertising. (Warning: Copious usage of the word "white" coming up.) It's nice Seven's finally wised up and stopped mentioning the country in every single damn commercial, but when it came time to advertise the show this year, they decided to give five teams "getting to know you commercials". Which was great, until they decided which teams to give commercials to. Let's look at this logically. The first season contained a Horde O' Whities, plus a team of Muslim guys who were lucky to even complete the first leg without collapsing into a heap, plus a Greek couple where scenes were edited out of order to make them seem far worse than they actually were solely for the purpose of trying to make us feel unsympathetic when they eventually get eliminated because of bad leg design (again, more later). It was also resoundingly criticised for not including any openly gay players, with producers giving the half-arsed excuse that they didn't want to cast a team "for the sake of it". Because that stopped them with their other casting. So when you're criticised for being too white and not inclusive enough, who do you choose to pimp in a season with seven minority contestants and a guy with a disability? Four white teams and the Token Asian/Designated Hitler, of course. I'm not usually one to play the race card, BUT... seriously, the two teams most of this season's enjoyment has come from are both minority teams (Italian and Lebanese sibling teams Lucy & Emilia and Joseph & Grace, respectively), and they're both in the final six with three white teams and the White/Asian mixed-race team, all of whom got commercials. Frankly, there is no other logical explanation for it, especially when the white teams who got commercials turned out to be a fun sponge, a fun vacuum, a fun enema, and a fun void. Not necessarily in that order. To have those teams not get commercials, AND to not give one to the team who could have shut up the critics about the race being too white? It's downright racist, even by Seven's advertising standards.

Cylinder The Fourth: Stop Trying To Make Fango Happen
This one's a nice quick one, I swear, but it's related to the promotion complaint. Seven's invested in something called "Fango", which from what I can tell is basically a glorified social media platform for dummies, and is insisting on putting promos for it up every five minutes or so during an episode, with an inane question like "Which Detour would you choose?" They seem to do it during all of their major shows, and... We're all using Twitter and Facebook. Give it up and stop ruining the episodes already.

Cylinder The Fifth: Stop Picking Obvious Locations
Part of the fun of The Amazing Race is being exposed to cultures you know very little about. Often, the best legs seem to happen in cities and countries that might not necessarily be obscure (in fact, when they use "unknown" countries the task designers tend to phone it in), but still aren't known for being big tourist destinations. Zurich, for example. Or Mongolia. Or Johannesburg. Meanwhile, the worst legs seem to happen in really well-known destinations. Dubai's had three legs in the American version, two in the Asian regional race, one in Norway's, and one in Australia's race. All seven of them have been disastrously bad. Even race staples India and China - visited by 14/28 and 18/30 seasons that have had the scope to do so respectively - haven't delivered a truly wonderful leg in a LONG time, to the point it's worth wondering why they're even still bothering.

On The Amazing Race Australia, the producers appear to have approached the course design with the mindset of selecting a dream wishlist of countries they'd love to go to. That's not entirely a bad thing - there have been some great selections, like Sri Lanka and Cuba, that probably wouldn't have been thought of otherwise - but what it means is that there's no ebb and flow to the race course. There's no real unexpected surprise locations, and it's even worse when they visit obvious CITIES within the obvious countries. Paris was lovely, but why not Lyon or Nice or Cannes? In India they went to Delhi and Jaipur, not really doing anything specifically related to the culture of either city. Why not go somewhere without the typical feel of "India" and pick Goa? Switzerland might have felt extremely random when the Australian version of The Biggest Loser visited there earlier this year, but it would have been extremely welcome on this season's course. Now that the entire course for the season has been revealed - the Philippines, India (again), the UAE, Turkey, France, Cuba, Canada, China (AGAIN), and Australia itself - you can't help notice it's pretty much the same as last season's course. Starting with an Asian island country, over half the race in Asia (assuming you count the visit to Singapore and the Turkey legs), a quick stopover visit in Europe... eh. Really, the most surprising moment on this season's race was when they went to France and Turkey but DIDN'T go to either Gallipoli or Villers-Bretonneux.

Based on the two seasons so far, it's pretty much a lock we'll get Thailand within the first three legs of next season, if not as the intermediate destination during this season's finale, but... really, that's the problem. It was great to FINALLY have a Pit Stop in the world's second-largest country, but overall the course is too easy to predict. Surprise us. There are so many regions in the world that have barely been explored. Take advantage of Australia's location and start with a leg in the South Pacific. Give us a mid-race leg in the United States. Do Malta instead of Italy, or Northern Ireland instead of England, or El Salvador instead of Mexico, or part of the former Yugoslavia instead of part of the former Soviet Union. Be the first non-US race to have a full leg in western Europe, or to have a leg in an African country that isn't South Africa. Be the first non-regional race ever to skip Asia entirely. Every other continent's been skipped before. At the very least, use it as sparingly as possible - we haven't even had a full-scale race spend fewer than four legs in the continent since 2007. Even given Australia's geographic location, it would definitely be possible - start with the South Pacific, use New Zealand as a connecting point to get to South America, head up north and over to Europe before returning through Africa, for example.

Cylinders The Sixth And Seventh: Stop "Twist Of The Week Syndrome" AND Stop Creating Such Bad Legs
Unlike many fans, I don't mind having legs where they complete a task or two before moving on to the next country. In a show where part of the entire conceit is "they have no idea what's in store for them", keeping the teams on their toes is very welcome, and in terms of production a tight finish is more likely when there's less time between a bunch and the Pit Stop. Twists are also welcome, for much the same reason. In theory. Unfortunately, from a leg design perspective this season has been nothing short of abysmal, with most legs being designed to come down to a single task. Regardo:

• Leg 1: A task in the starting city followed by a full plane bunch is fine. A producer-mandated stratification for charter vehicles in the middle of the first leg is traditional (having appeared in some form or another in twelve of the first thirteen American premieres), and it gets a pass. What doesn't get a pass is a lopsided Detour design that amounts to even less when the final task is so time-consuming as to destroy all leads gained and basically make the first leg's result a crapshoot.
• Leg 2: The final task of the leg was edited out, so it's really impossible to tell how well the leg overall was designed overall.
• Leg 3: A portable Pit Stop which removes bunching and basically makes it impossible for trailing teams to catch up unless there's a huge cockup from another team, PLUS a Detour edited out, PLUS a Road Block that due to its design is as much "drive over there" as it is "pass a local driving test", PLUS a task with built-in "sit around and wait" time penalties, PLUS a task that might have been in a cool location but which was near impossible to follow on television? Not a good leg.
• Leg 4: You have the first variation on the "help yourselves by screwing the others over" idea to actually almost work (though the U-Turn is still deeply flawed), and you follow it up with an exceedingly lame task right before the Pit Stop designed to ruin everything that's happened so far during the leg? Not cool, guys.
• Leg 5: The midleg flight worked although the producers were damn lucky the U-Turned team was able to catch the same flight, and having the only task that actually matters be one that is blatantly designed to force penalties was a downright HORRIBLE idea. Especially when it's a non-elimination and the size of the penalties make the next episode a foregone conclusion.
• Leg 6: The team spared at the end of the previous leg must either win this leg OR get a lead of more than thirty minutes on the second-last team... and the leg contains a quick task where positions basically can't change, a Yield that if used properly would have ensured they remained in last place, a lopsided Detour where it would have been basically impossible to make up any time, an Intersection that would have guaranteed any potential time gain would have been voided (and which shouldn't have been there at all when the number of teams present for the leg was unknown at the time of designing the race), a quick task that didn't really need the Intersection to begin with at all, a "set amount of time" Road Block where positions literally can't change at all, AND a Pit Stop that's basically only two minutes walk away. The only thing that actually matters is the taxi ride from the Intersection to the Road Block, and it's nowhere near long enough for anyone to make up more than thirty minutes, let alone make up the all-but-guaranteed four hour time penalty from quitting the last leg's Road Block.
• Leg 7: Nothing says Paris like industrial kitchens and dank market basements. And even though I know there was a Detour edited out in Havana, having it edited out so the entire Cuba section - the climax of the episode - comes down to "drive over there, no wait, drive over there" makes the producers look completely and utterly incompetent.
• Leg 8: Cuba. A country and a culture where the leg should practically design itself. Yet we get two tasks based around an American, one based around Australian business interests, and a jigsaw puzzle.
• Leg 9: Generally speaking I can't fault the design of this one, although given multiple teams ran out of money early in the leg (which has been a theme throughout the entire season with the stingy cash values given), they really should have been given more. Vancouver's not a cheap city.

I don't want to be That Guy who claims he could do better, but... seriously. Based on this season, I could.

Cylinder The Eighth: Three Little Letters, One Big Revenue Source
With tasks being edited out pretty much every week and episodes airing all over the schedule (Wednesday at 9:00pm for the first four weeks, Monday at 7:30pm for the next five, then taking two weeks off and apparently dumping the remaining three episodes off in a single week, with one of the Wednesday episodes being moved to Thursday in some states and all episodes subject to Seven's usual contempt for both viewers and the concept of advertised starting times), the season's been impossible to follow. I wouldn't be surprised if even some of the contestants themselves were struggling to keep up. This is a show that is absolutely perfect for a DVD release - many will buy it just to catch the episodes they missed in The Great Timeslot Shuffle 2012, many others will buy it as huge fans, and with the deleted tasks and audio commentaries as extras it'll be borderline perfect - but Australian television networks have been extraordinarily slow on the uptake of selling DVDs to begin with (indeed even now there's probably fewer than a dozen local series from before 2008 that have DVD releases) and it's almost certainly not going to get one because they seem to think knowing who wins a reality show is somehow more harmful to its rewatch value than, say, knowing that Maggie Simpson shot Mr. Burns, or that Joey picks Pacey instead of Dawson, or that the gondola used for an aerial stunt in this season's Vancouver episode is the same one Mulder dangled from in that episode of The X-Files when Scully got abducted. To which I can only say one thing: Smithers, release the robotic Richard Simmons.

Also, while you're at it: The Mole. Preferably the seasons without Tom Williams.

The Amazing Race (CHINA): Season 2 Task Guide

Same basic idea as the TAR Australia guide I did last week, although hopefully made a little easier to read. Here you go.