I thought I'd do something a bit different with this entry, and go over a few of the finer points of how to make a successful reality show. Despite the vast number of shows and the vast discrepancies in formats and general quality, there are a few basic things which every show needs to keep in mind. Obviously my focus is still on challenge design, but this isn't going to simply be restricted to it. Shall we begin?
THE CHALLENGES ARE YOUR A-PLOT, THE CAST IS YOUR B-PLOT
Challenges determine the success of your show more than the players, more than the host, and more than the little bits of foreshadowing you stick in to make the winner seem obvious in hindsight. Good challenges tend to save seasons with bad casting, but bad challenges tend to ruin those with good casts. Seems simple enough to understand, right? You'd be shocked. How many reality TV seasons with decent reputations have terrible challenges? And how many seasons with bad reputations have good task design? Exactly. You definitely want both, but challenges need to take precedence over casting.
"THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE", "TRUST NO ONE", ETC.
The easier it is to explain a challenge within a single sentence, the more likely it is to be remembered as a good challenge. It doesn't matter what show you're on. Go ahead, think back to the challenges that really made you go "Fuuuuuuck, that's awesome." Are there any that can't be described in one sentence, once you cut out all the extra variables and get down to the basic concept? Probably not. Whether it's "starting in separate locked hotel rooms, work together to escape using mobile phones and a series of hidden clues" or "search the streets of Zurich on foot for three numbers which can be combined to form the combination for a safe" or "Ignore all the gatecrashers passing through the Big Brother house", every single task that is memorable - for the right reasons, at least - can be explained succinctly.
On the other hand, the most recent US Survivor season (Survivor: Philippines) had a challenge that involved a three-round elimination format, with each round featuring both a trivia question (with cumulative penalties for wrong answers) and a race across a physical obstacle, plus the final obstacle was markedly different than the first two, PLUS it was basically the same challenge as one seen in the previous episode, PLUS as a consequence of the previous challenge one player qualified directly for the final round, avoiding both the exhaustion of the obstacles and the penalties. Unlike much of the online community, I don't believe the challenge was rigged to favour the advantaged player. I do, however, believe it was a ridiculously poor effort on the part of the show's challenge designers, even in a season that basically didn't have a single good challenge from about episode three onwards (and even given those three episodes were a godsend after pretty much eight or nine entire seasons of mediocrity). Would anybody have called it rigged if the challenge was at least mildly adequate? I doubt it.
DON'T REPEAT YOURSELF. (NO, REALLY. DON'T REPEAT YOURSELF. DON'T.)
In precisely what circumstance is reusing a challenge from an earlier season (or even another version of the show) a good idea? There's no valid answer to this simple question. The challenge was great the first time? It won't live up to the lofty expectations set for it. The challenge wasn't great the first time, and you think it deserves a second chance? History has shown it doesn't work. Doing it for random nostalgia? It just serves to remind fans your show used to be much better. Doing it in an All-Star season, or a season with a similar gimmick? Your goal shouldn't be to compound the lack of originality in casting, it should be to compensate for it with even better challenges than usual. Just give us something new.
KEEP YOUR TWISTS ORGANIC
It's great to have twists to throw the contestants for a loop. Really, it is. But make sure the twists you use are organic and don't feel like you're doing them for the sake
of ratings. The Amazing Race having a Road Block before a Detour for
the first time in its fourth season worked because it was just something
that happened, it wasn't as if the producers were going "LOOK TWIZT
ZOMG!!1!1!!1!" Survivor's Redemption Island twist, on the other hand? Yeeeeeeah.
LEARN FROM SCRIPTED TELEVISION
Challenges are the closest thing you have to an actual plot on a reality show. Scripted television works because the storylines matter on two levels - both on the surface ("Homer buys Lisa a pony and has to work at the Kwik-E-Mart to pay for it") and at a deeper level ("How far will parents go to make their kids happy?"). Out of necessity the metaphors are more superficial on reality shows, with challenges based more on locations and cultures and sponsors rather than humanity's greatest questions, but you still do need them.
It's the same issue with pacing. On a scripted television show, you don't build a story up for six episodes and then have a filler episode directly before the finale, you put the filler episode first before the story arc begins. On a reality show, you need the same frame of mind. The challenges (and prizes, if there are any) need to get more and more awe-inspiring as the season goes, rather than petering out towards the end, but at the same time the challenges can't be too easy or too hard at any given point. The biggest issue with challenge design and pacing, it needs to be said, are the half-assed warm-up episodes at the beginning of many seasons. No. Just... no. They don't work, and they just piss people off. (The most notable example is Survivor, and while I'm going to do a proper "It's broken, here's how to fix it" post for it after seeing how the upcoming season pans out, for now: Stop using 'but we need to show everybody!' as your reason for doing it when you just spend the time gained from combining an episode's challenges showing the same people you were focusing on anyway. You got problems? Stop trying to cast more people than there are minutes in your show.)
Similarly, you also have to design a challenge so different types of strategy can be used to solve it, much like how a story on a scripted show won't work if there's only one way for the writers to handle it. That doesn't necessarily mean to combine different types of challenge in a single event - in fact, it just makes it more likely the same people are going to win challenge after challenge after challenge when the show is essentially replacing "Who is best at obstacle courses?" and "Who is best at jigsaws?" with "Who is best at jigsaws after finishing an obstacle course?" - but having multiple ways of approaching a challenge curtails the biggest problem many challenges have, that we as viewers are simply watching people do the same thing the same way, over and over again. (A corollary to this is the power of deception which, assuming the challenge is still reasonably difficult even with the added wrinkle, is a challenge designer's best friend.)
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Monday, November 19, 2012
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.
This section... really, actual facts here could do this particular section more justice than any amount of argument:
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.
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 fromAzerjaben 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?
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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
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.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
The Great Big Challenge Guide: Survivor
So the idea here is instead of having one massive file that takes forever to sort and scroll through, I thought I'd split the second version of my Survivor challenge guide by season. I'm going to add these seasons one at a time instead of all at once, and each episode now contains a proper analysis of its challenges and twists. Note that despite seasons being missing, I am writing these descriptions as though they are present - thus, challenges repeated without change are skipped over and will be discussed in the original appearances. Feel free to comment on this post to tell me what needs to be improved and changed for future seasons, and to request particular seasons. (I'll also be doing this for seasons of several other shows at the same time, so updates may not always be immediate.)
Let's begin, shall we? They'll be listed in chronological order when they are added.
October 29, 2012 - Guatemala, The Maya Empire (Challenge Tracker)
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Survivor Challenge Guide, Volume 2, Part 1: Seasons 21-24
So, that said, enjoy.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Can I Do Better? Vol. 1: Masterchef Australia
So, I know I don't post here often enough. I also don't prove that when I claim I could do better, I actually can. So to kill two birds with one stone, I'm starting a new series.
The basic idea here is that every week or so, I'll post a group of at least three reality show challenge (or twist) ideas for the same show. I'm not going to do the same show two weeks in a row, but beyond that there's no guarantee which shows will appear. Depending on my mood, the challenges may be for a current show, a cancelled show, or a non-existent show I'm creating solely for the post. Please be aware that I'm not necessarily aware of every challenge that has appeared on every version of a show, so apologies in advance if these ideas have been used before.
Right. So.
Your fairly standard reality cooking show, pretty much. There's a few basic types of challenges (team challenges, "core ingredient" Invention Tests, "follow this complicated recipe" Pressure Tests, and the "make something with any or all of the ingredients hidden beneath this crate" Mystery Box) that turn up frequently, but there are also frequently other challenges that do not follow these formats. The main difference with this show and others like the Top Chef franchises and Hell's Kitchen is this show is based around everyday people rather than professional chefs, which somehow makes it seem less pompous even though the challenges are about the same level of difficulty.
This week, I'll be focusing on different ideas for the Mystery Box and Invention Test challenges. I've also got the generic logo there, but these are ideas suited best to the Australian version of the show.
BASIS: Throughout the various seasons of Masterchef, there are a number of cuisines that turn up with monotonous regularity, particularly from Mediterranean Europe (Spanish, French, Italian, Greek) and eastern Asia (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Thai), meaning it's easy to forget there's a whole world of food out there.
IDEA: The remaining players (let's pretend there are eight) are presented eight different Mystery Boxes at the front of the kitchen. Using whatever means the producers wish to select an order (I'd go with the order they're standing in to be completely fair), one player at a time must select a box and open it to reveal an ingredient ubiquitous in a particular "forgotten" yet easily identifiable cuisine, and a card telling them which cuisine they must cook. I'm envisioning the sort of cuisines where there are a few obvious basic ideas but also enough leeway available to do something clever and unexpected -- Hungarian (with paprika as the secret ingredient) or Dutch (pickled herring, or pretty much any cold-water fish) or Welsh (leeks) would work particularly well. Once they've each selected a box, they have ninety minutes to prepare a meal in their cuisine, featuring their ingredient.
BASIS: It's great to have challenges involving blast chillers and all sorts of complex and expensive ingredients and methods, but at the same time there are thousands of people living from paycheck to paycheck, sometimes unable to even afford basic groceries to the point where food charities such as OzHarvest (who the show donates unused food to) are needed.
IDEA: Using only an assortment of typical low-budget ingredients available from a food charity collection point (things like lesser cuts of meat, two-minute noodles and day-old bread, for example), and a maximum of one pot, one saucepan, and one oven tray, prepare a restaurant quality meal within one hour.
BASIS: The 2012 season of Masterchef Australia featured multiple contestants specialising in the art of desserts, and multiple challenges catering to their strengths, so much so that it may have well just been retitled Masterchef: Just Desserts.
IDEA: Prepare a platter of hors d'oeuvres for "a party", using only the ingredients available in the Masterchef pantry. To make it more difficult, there are neither eggs nor seafood products in the pantry. Everybody's seen devilled eggs and oysters before. As with the challenge listed above, one hour is allotted for cooking.
The basic idea here is that every week or so, I'll post a group of at least three reality show challenge (or twist) ideas for the same show. I'm not going to do the same show two weeks in a row, but beyond that there's no guarantee which shows will appear. Depending on my mood, the challenges may be for a current show, a cancelled show, or a non-existent show I'm creating solely for the post. Please be aware that I'm not necessarily aware of every challenge that has appeared on every version of a show, so apologies in advance if these ideas have been used before.
Right. So.
Your fairly standard reality cooking show, pretty much. There's a few basic types of challenges (team challenges, "core ingredient" Invention Tests, "follow this complicated recipe" Pressure Tests, and the "make something with any or all of the ingredients hidden beneath this crate" Mystery Box) that turn up frequently, but there are also frequently other challenges that do not follow these formats. The main difference with this show and others like the Top Chef franchises and Hell's Kitchen is this show is based around everyday people rather than professional chefs, which somehow makes it seem less pompous even though the challenges are about the same level of difficulty.
This week, I'll be focusing on different ideas for the Mystery Box and Invention Test challenges. I've also got the generic logo there, but these are ideas suited best to the Australian version of the show.
IDEA #1: Forgotten Flavours
BASIS: Throughout the various seasons of Masterchef, there are a number of cuisines that turn up with monotonous regularity, particularly from Mediterranean Europe (Spanish, French, Italian, Greek) and eastern Asia (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Thai), meaning it's easy to forget there's a whole world of food out there.
IDEA: The remaining players (let's pretend there are eight) are presented eight different Mystery Boxes at the front of the kitchen. Using whatever means the producers wish to select an order (I'd go with the order they're standing in to be completely fair), one player at a time must select a box and open it to reveal an ingredient ubiquitous in a particular "forgotten" yet easily identifiable cuisine, and a card telling them which cuisine they must cook. I'm envisioning the sort of cuisines where there are a few obvious basic ideas but also enough leeway available to do something clever and unexpected -- Hungarian (with paprika as the secret ingredient) or Dutch (pickled herring, or pretty much any cold-water fish) or Welsh (leeks) would work particularly well. Once they've each selected a box, they have ninety minutes to prepare a meal in their cuisine, featuring their ingredient.
IDEA #2: Charity Begins At Home
BASIS: It's great to have challenges involving blast chillers and all sorts of complex and expensive ingredients and methods, but at the same time there are thousands of people living from paycheck to paycheck, sometimes unable to even afford basic groceries to the point where food charities such as OzHarvest (who the show donates unused food to) are needed.
IDEA: Using only an assortment of typical low-budget ingredients available from a food charity collection point (things like lesser cuts of meat, two-minute noodles and day-old bread, for example), and a maximum of one pot, one saucepan, and one oven tray, prepare a restaurant quality meal within one hour.
IDEA #3: Party Flavours
BASIS: The 2012 season of Masterchef Australia featured multiple contestants specialising in the art of desserts, and multiple challenges catering to their strengths, so much so that it may have well just been retitled Masterchef: Just Desserts.
IDEA: Prepare a platter of hors d'oeuvres for "a party", using only the ingredients available in the Masterchef pantry. To make it more difficult, there are neither eggs nor seafood products in the pantry. Everybody's seen devilled eggs and oysters before. As with the challenge listed above, one hour is allotted for cooking.
Sunday, August 5, 2012
An Open Letter To The International Olympic Committee and Olympic Games Broadcasters
To the members of the International Olympic Committee and its delegations, and to the various delegations of broadcasters assigned to cover the Olympic Games telecasts,
In the lead-up to the current Olympic Games in London, it emerged throughout the media that you were ensuring local vendors were not trying to use the Olympics' name to help their business. And while it may not have come across as a particularly endearing moment on the IOC's part, you are completely within your rights to do this - after all, not only are the Olympics themselves a brand with enormous pulling power, but several other companies have invested massive sums of money in order to become official sponsors. It's completely reasonable to try and protect their investments and the importance of being deemed an "official" sponsor.
But at the same time, while the Olympics are a brand, the OLYMPICS are a BRAND. Much of your funding comes from the sale of television broadcast rights. Those television rights allow the networks to essentially broadcast the sports at whatever time they wish and with any commentary they choose, whether that be their own, an audio feed from another international broadcast network, or without commentary at all. Again, well within their rights, although they'd be stupid not to do it live with results being published on the internet instantaneously. As with any other show, they are allowed to present it however they wish. After all, the Olympics are basically a reality show with the Opening Ceremony as the premiere and the usual patch of dull mid-season episodes replaced by two weeks of season finales.
That being said, however, which is more harmful to the longterm success of the Olympic Games: A little shop in the middle of England using a lovingly-created tissuepaper replica of the Olympic rings for their window as the torch passes through town, selling (let's say for the sake of argument) two Pepsis instead of the customer going to the supermarket next door and buying two Coca-Colas for the same price, OR having your official broadcast networks provide coverage abysmal to the point newsreaders from other networks are taking pointed, unmistakable jabs at their incompetence in national bulletins and approximately nobody in the audience disagrees?
To put it succinctly: If the coverage is poor, viewers go elsewhere to learn the results. If viewers go elsewhere, the market value of the Olympics is diminished, and less money can be obtained from networks and sponsors. Conversely, if the coverage is brilliant, audience members tune in, and the increased audience makes the contracts more lucrative. Therefore, it is in the IOC's best interests to ensure the coverage is as good as possible.
At the moment, unfortunately, the coverages on the NBC family in the United States and on the Nine Network and Foxtel in Australia are less like Glee and more like Viva Laughlin. Yes. It's so bad GLEE is the HIGH watermark. There are enough examples of both networks' incompetence online, though I find it hard to believe we will top Karl Stefanovic's "I knew you were going to be trouble just looking at you" to a panel of three of the greatest black athletes of the modern era. We haven't seen such casual racism at the Olympics since... oh, since the time they were used as Nazi propaganda. At this stage, in order for the IOC to continue reaping the benefits of the viewing audience - and let's be honest, the Olympics probably would have been abandoned by now without American TV rights in particular - they need to get off their backsides and start instituting some quality control. I'm not entirely sure what that would entail (the best solution I can think of is for the IOC to limit the amount of replays and filler in official broadcasts, and to organise a shared pool of commentators to remove the jingoism that makes the Games less "Hey, it's that one time every four years when we remember Estonia exists!" and more "HOW THE HELL CAN AUSTRALIA BE LOSING? AREN'T WE THE ONLY COUNTRY COMPETING?!"), but something needs to be done. Yesterday.
-- The viewing public (Remember us?)
In the lead-up to the current Olympic Games in London, it emerged throughout the media that you were ensuring local vendors were not trying to use the Olympics' name to help their business. And while it may not have come across as a particularly endearing moment on the IOC's part, you are completely within your rights to do this - after all, not only are the Olympics themselves a brand with enormous pulling power, but several other companies have invested massive sums of money in order to become official sponsors. It's completely reasonable to try and protect their investments and the importance of being deemed an "official" sponsor.
But at the same time, while the Olympics are a brand, the OLYMPICS are a BRAND. Much of your funding comes from the sale of television broadcast rights. Those television rights allow the networks to essentially broadcast the sports at whatever time they wish and with any commentary they choose, whether that be their own, an audio feed from another international broadcast network, or without commentary at all. Again, well within their rights, although they'd be stupid not to do it live with results being published on the internet instantaneously. As with any other show, they are allowed to present it however they wish. After all, the Olympics are basically a reality show with the Opening Ceremony as the premiere and the usual patch of dull mid-season episodes replaced by two weeks of season finales.
That being said, however, which is more harmful to the longterm success of the Olympic Games: A little shop in the middle of England using a lovingly-created tissuepaper replica of the Olympic rings for their window as the torch passes through town, selling (let's say for the sake of argument) two Pepsis instead of the customer going to the supermarket next door and buying two Coca-Colas for the same price, OR having your official broadcast networks provide coverage abysmal to the point newsreaders from other networks are taking pointed, unmistakable jabs at their incompetence in national bulletins and approximately nobody in the audience disagrees?
To put it succinctly: If the coverage is poor, viewers go elsewhere to learn the results. If viewers go elsewhere, the market value of the Olympics is diminished, and less money can be obtained from networks and sponsors. Conversely, if the coverage is brilliant, audience members tune in, and the increased audience makes the contracts more lucrative. Therefore, it is in the IOC's best interests to ensure the coverage is as good as possible.
At the moment, unfortunately, the coverages on the NBC family in the United States and on the Nine Network and Foxtel in Australia are less like Glee and more like Viva Laughlin. Yes. It's so bad GLEE is the HIGH watermark. There are enough examples of both networks' incompetence online, though I find it hard to believe we will top Karl Stefanovic's "I knew you were going to be trouble just looking at you" to a panel of three of the greatest black athletes of the modern era. We haven't seen such casual racism at the Olympics since... oh, since the time they were used as Nazi propaganda. At this stage, in order for the IOC to continue reaping the benefits of the viewing audience - and let's be honest, the Olympics probably would have been abandoned by now without American TV rights in particular - they need to get off their backsides and start instituting some quality control. I'm not entirely sure what that would entail (the best solution I can think of is for the IOC to limit the amount of replays and filler in official broadcasts, and to organise a shared pool of commentators to remove the jingoism that makes the Games less "Hey, it's that one time every four years when we remember Estonia exists!" and more "HOW THE HELL CAN AUSTRALIA BE LOSING? AREN'T WE THE ONLY COUNTRY COMPETING?!"), but something needs to be done. Yesterday.
-- The viewing public (Remember us?)
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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