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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Amazing Race (CHINA): Season 2 Task Guide

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

The Amazing Race (Australia): Season 2, Part 1

PDF analysis. Because I'm all classy and stuff.

The Mole: A Brief Obsessive Challenge Guide

No review this time, just a guide. Yeah, I could have done reviews, but once you see the enormity of this project you'll understand why I didn't. Plus, I'm hoping to do other even bigger shows in the future, and I'd really rather not keel over from exhaustion.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

In other news, completing this guide has made me realise three things:

(1) Everybody in the world is better at making reality television than the Americans. I'm sorry, Americans, but it's true. This show is generally brought up as one of the best American reality shows and yet... the first two seasons are mediocre at best, and the rest are pretty much a steaming load (clarification: by comparison).

(2) This show needs to be brought back to Australian television. As long as they got rid of the live eliminations and kept Tom Williams the crap away from it, it should be good. Should. Unfortunately, the only way this'll be back is if Nine decides to put it in the 7pm weeknight slot vacated by the aptly named Excess Baggage. And if they do that we'll get stuck with Jules Lund hosting, a possibility which will leave fans thinking only one thing: "Fuck that shit, I could do better." (Although I suppose given the above link, I could do better.)

(3) I have no life, and it is very difficult to write descriptions of some of these challenges without spoiling the episodes and making fun of the incompetent nitwits who tend to get cast. Which means I'm perfectly available and willing in the event someone at Nine has commonsense and refuses to let Jules anywhere near this. Call me, guys?

The Price Is Right (AUSTRALIA) 2012

(Note to usual blog readers: Yeah, I know. Not a reality show. I'm pretty sure the Blogger Police will understand.)

As you may be aware if you were anywhere near Twitter last Monday, The Price is Right is back on television in Australia. And sadly, during its break the little game show that could got a botched facelift in Phuket and is now looking like the little old hag that shouldn't have. It's not surprising therefore that viewer reaction is even more negative than the panto hatred we all pretended to have for that One Dollar Deal game when in reality we were all happy the contestant had to work to get their car. And though it may be hard to disagree the only thing not half-assed about the show's latest reincarnation is viewer apathy, many of the claims made against the show's credibility (including on A Current Affair, a rival network consumer-affairs show that has a habit of complaining about shows on other networks at least two or three times a week) simply don't ring true.

Easily the largest problem with the show, and the root of all of the show's other problems, is that the studio used for the show is simply too damn small for a show of this magnitude. With a tiny studio, there's no room for an audience of the size seen in the prior incarnations, nor enough room for a turntable set like that generally used to play the show's games on, nor enough room to place large prizes behind the show's three “doors”. In one episode, a fairly small rug had to be draped over a pouffe just so the entirety of it could fit behind the door. In another, an inflatable jumping castle couldn't fit into the gap, and so the show's irritating new announcer Brodie Young had to stand by it in some backstage area and pretend he knew how to model and read the prize copy at the same time. He failed to do either, instead awkwardly remarking about how a young relative of his had one.

The combination of the tiny doors (not helped by incredibly claustrophobic staging to begin with, or the completely pointless giant set of stairs to one side of the set) and losing the turntable means that all games now need to be conducted on the main stage in front of the doors rather than off to the side. The most obvious side-effect of this is that it makes it completely unfeasible for the show to give away any cars outside of the Showcase final round. And even then, the car is a notably miniscule thing that the unlucky model charged with driving onto the stage has to inch out in order to avoid crashing into the set or the prize almost certainly randomly placed at the far end. But why can't this prize go behind one of the doors? Well, because the show is so cheap they have to use a plasma display randomly placed on the doors in order to actually play for the showcase. Yes, that's right. The show doesn't even have a proper set for the most important game of the episode, yet somehow has decided six useless plasma screens that really don't even look that great on television are a necessity. This isn't without precedent – what exactly was the purpose of that stockticker running across the top of the last version's set? - but at least then they had the presence of mind to make the game sets display some semblance of personality. Here, someone has apparently decided that minimalist works.

Even with the budget, which could not possibly be farther from the truth. The obvious comparison to make – and indeed, the comparison that seems to have been made by many – is that since the showcases are no longer worth in excess of half a million dollars, the show's budget is tighter than a virgin at Mardi Gras. However, it's worth noting that the hyper-inflated showcases were only added to the show as an attempt to stop the show's declining ratings after Seven placed the revamped Deal or No Deal in its timeslot. Oh, the irony. Back before the addition of a Gold Coast apartment or an Alfa Romeo or cash bribes to the showcase, the average value of a showcase was in the low thirty-thousands. It's still larger than the showcases we've had so far, but not by as much as the public seems to think. The real issue with the showcase looking cheap is twofold: Firstly, there's one prize less to win (though with the game's structure this also theoretically makes the showcase six times easier to win), but more importantly the car takes up more of the budget than previously. In the old versions, you'd get a cheaper car but the rest of the prizes would be more expensive. Usually, there'd only be one item worth less than $1000, and the most expensive would be somewhere approaching $4000. Now, you generally get three three-digit prizes and the most expensive isn't even worth two grand. It's that sort of thing that makes the show feel cheap.

When it comes to the smaller pricing games, the difference is more startling. It's understandable that the small set means car games are impossible, even if that means this latest rebirth abandons the running joke the last four versions have had of the premiere's first pricing game being “One Dollar Deal”. But at the same time, the prizes available should certainly be worth more than they are. With the prize values important in only less than half of the fourteen pricing games (compared to 23 out of 27 in the last incarnation), I can kind of see why Seven thought they didn't need to bother. They were wrong. In addition to the game selection being fairly mediocre to begin with, the cheap prizes completely remove any semblance of tension from the decent games we do have. When the miniature golf game “Hole In One” was played in the previous version, host Larry Emdur used to remind contestants just before they took their putt (and us at home) that they were playing for a car often worth over $30,000. Even at the game's absolute cheapest, you could still expect to play for five thousand dollars cash. Now, you'd be lucky if the prize is more impressive than a voucher for Big W, the show's official sponsor. Which is a bit like making McDonald's the official sponsors of Masterchef, or like making Pauline Hanson the official sponsors of The Amazing Race Australia, or like making McDonald's the official sponsors of The Biggest Loser. (And speaking of The Amazing Race, having Big W sponsor this show isn't going to help those rumours about that team of Big W employees last year being corporate plants.) Why wouldn't they at least try and make the show look like it had a big budget so that it could take over Deal or No Deal's timeslot and give Hot Seat a run for its money? Deal's on its last legs anyway, but Seven insists on beating a dead horse. (Besides, if we wanted to watch a bunch of easy games for cheap prizes, Brodie would still be hosting Quizmania.)

Contrary to most, I don't actually mind that they got rid of the Big Wheel showcase playoff segment, or the Contestant's Row bits that determined who would get to play a game. The former was always out of place, having approximately nothing to do with the show's basic “pricing assorted items” theme aside from nominally terming the point values earned as “cents”, while the latter was never really that interesting, although it did occasionally lead to some odd moments like older ladies playing games for power tools or men playing for bikinis. Without it, all those moments are incredibly unlikely. In theory. In actuality, one of the show's most-publicised new games, “Plinko”, debuted with a contestant who couldn't get up the prop's staircase. Why on earth would any producer have picked a player like that, knowing exactly which game she would need to play? Even when the old version used to occasionally pick a contestant in a wheelchair, they made sure that if the Race Game (which required running, as the title suggests) was scheduled it was played before the contestant who couldn't run was told to come on down.

The selection of games themselves really isn't that impressive either, even before you take into account all the ridiculous and unnecessary tweaks Seven has made to the format. Five grocery-based games out of fourteen? The awesome “Bump”, renamed “Push Over” and now for only one prize? Especially since the one game seen in the entire premiere-opening Ian Turpie tribute was a fairly difficult car game that we only had for that twelve-episode primetime run in 1989 (and why DID we get still shots from the Channel Ten version when he hosted the show on Seven for years?), it seems odd to have simplified so many of the games to the point of being unrecognisable. Apparently Seven thinks we don't have the ability to use the internet, or the ability to remember what games were like in the old version.

The Amazing Race: Yield, U-Turn, and Lame Variants

As we continue to stretch The Fabric of Reality, I felt it prescient in the wake of some maddening news about the upcoming second season of The Amazing Race Australia to analyse exactly why the Yield, the U-Turn, and variants there of have not worked - and never will work - on the race. Because apparently nobody in production has seemed to twig yet that they aren't popular with fans AND they're a mess from a race design standpoint.

The Yield, introduced in The Amazing Race 5, was instantly unpopular with fans as it came across as a poor substitute for the Fast Forward. Both had very similar basic concepts - a race power that a team could only use once to try and ensure their safety in the game - but where the Fast Forward was an extra task that allowed the team using it to gain a head start, the Yield allowed the team using it to disadvantage a team behind them by forcing them to stand around like hockey goons while an hourglass dripped away. Part of the problem is that in the preceding four seasons the show had always prided itself on not being one of those reality shows that relied on contestants fighting with each other in order to be entertaining, and this sudden decision (combined with a reduction in the number of Fast Forwards) felt at odds with that. Even the contestants noticed this, and while the Yield actually appeared in each of the first eleven legs of the race, it was actually shown in just four episodes and was only ever used ONCE, at the very last opportunity. So, why wasn't it used? Was it just general hatred of the idea, or were there design issues from the beginning. I'd argue both. Fifteen seasons later people are still refusing to use the similar U-Turn (discussed below) on moral grounds, while almost every Fast Forward in the same time period has been attempted, so clearly people still don't like the concept for whatever reason. It's hard to tell if tinkering with it will help alleviate the design issues, but I suspect from the efforts made so far that getting the basic "screw another team to help yourselves" idea to work on this particular show is a bit like trying to polish the proverbial turd.

The first main problem noticed was that people didn't want to be the victim of a "revenge attack" after using the Yield. To try and avoid this, the number of Yields present during the season was drastically reduced to three for The Amazing Race 6, and to two just two seasons later after further non-use in The Amazing Race 7 (in turn caused by such a revenge Yield actually happening during its final usage in season six). And, yes, it did work to an extent. In seasons eight through eleven, there were seven shown Yields, all of which were used. However, thanks to the design of the legs the Yields were placed on, only one Yield in its entire seven-season history ever succeeded in causing a team's elimination. Since the reduction after season five, there were thirteen shown Yields. Five of these were on predetermined non-elimination legs and a sixth was on the first half of a two-episode leg, meaning none of the Yielded teams was ever going to be eliminated. Of the remaining seven, one was on a leg with the infamous "eat two kilograms of meat" Road Block that was designed to invoke quitters (thus making the Yield worthless), while all but two of the rest were directly before tasks heavily reliant on random luck. One of those was ruined when the first team to arrive stupidly decided they'd rather win a prize than have a guaranteed place in the finals with the oldest, slowest team in Race history, while the other was the Yield's only success.

The second and third problems the producers attempted to fix were actually done simultaneously in The Amazing Race 12. Firstly, to avoid those pesky non-eliminations and luck challenges ruining the intended effect, they were only placed on legs where a team was to be eliminated AND where the tasks required actual skill to complete. Secondly, because this is a race and watching people standing around is counterproductive to the entire concept, the hourglass was replaced with making the team complete a U-Turn by backtracking to the Detour (always the previous task) to complete the other option. Unfortunately, the two solutions cancelled each other out. Yes, the increased likelihood of elimination made it more likely the U-Turn would have an effect, BUT it was only a few weeks ago (almost nine full seasons since its introduction) that a team eliminated in a leg with a used U-Turn wasn't U-Turned themselves, meaning that for basically that entire time it's been a total anticlimax whenever it has appeared. So what's made the U-Turn so hard to survive? Mostly, it's the need to complete the second Detour option. As a U-Turned team must travel from the Detour to the U-Turn, then back to the Detour, then back to the U-Turn sign, then to the next task (often in a crowded, busy city), the Detour tasks themselves can't be too time-consuming to complete. If neither task is quick, then the U-Turned team will fall too far behind and is doomed. If the tasks are unbalanced, everyone will pick the quick option, and the U-Turned team will again be screwed. If both tasks are inconsequential enough to overcome, then you might as well not bother having a Detour at all. Likewise, if the Detour is the final task before the Pit Stop there's almost no chance for them to make up the lost time, and the same issues arise.

Rather than fix this issue the moment it was obvious, the next tweak made was to try and avoid the "revenge attack" aspect (which led to the U-Turn's non-usage in The Amazing Race 13) even more by making it possible for teams to U-Turn without having to identify themselves. Because it totally matters if a team who's going to get eliminated anyway knows who to blame. The actual idea here is kind of sound in concept, but it really wasn't the fix needed, and it doesn't actually fix any of the pressing issues.

Finally, in The Amazing Race 17 we got an attempt to fix the anticlimactic episodes by allowing two separate teams to U-Turn others at the same time (instead of only one per leg). And while something needed to be done, this... is not going to help at all, from a strategic standpoint. Put simply, once the first U-Turn is used, there's no logical reason for anybody except the U-Turned team themselves to use the second U-Turn when they arrive. But that doesn't fix the anticlimax; in fact, quite the opposite. If the first U-Turned team is already in last place, there's nobody they can U-Turn, and they will fall even farther behind. If they U-Turn a team they know is behind them, it just means that instead of having a main bunch with one team significantly behind, there's a main bunch with one U-Turned team significantly behind them, who in turn is likely to be significantly ahead of the second U-Turned team by the end of the leg unless they happen to arrive at the U-Turn sign in a footrace. And as the U-Turn by design can't be the first thing after teams are bunched together, that's both incredibly unlikely and an impossible situation for the producers to force.

More to the point, and to bring the actual reason for this post back into focus, the Israeli version recently attempted to tweak the Yield and U-Turn by making the decision of who is delayed the result of a vote conducted at an earlier point in the leg. This twist is apparently being incorporated by the same producers into the Australian version. And there are so many problems with the idea, I don't even know where to begin. The smart strategy decision is, obviously, to U-Turn the team in last place. But having to vote before the Detour just makes it impossible to gauge where people will be in the pack at the U-Turn, and these same producers have openly admitted casting for people who aren't familiar with the show, which will likely lead to personal grudges taking precedence over the actual substitute logical decision of trying to get rid of one's biggest threats. Especially considering the last season of The Amazing Race Australia was basically ruined by the order teams were eliminated - with basically the most fascinating team booted each time until we were left with three bland pretty teams who really had no business even being cast reaching the final - it seems like the stupidest possible decision to give teams an outlet to essentially vote for the team they want to eliminate each leg. The bland teams will likely just skate through unless they dominate every leg (in which case, said domination will almost certainly negate most if not all of the time loss), and we'll have the same problems that resulted in the show basically losing half its audience by the finale last season. And that's even before you consider how Australian audiences have reacted in the past to shows with cast voting - The Hot House? Australian Survivor? Both versions? The voting eliminations during the first season of Masterchef? There's a reason none of them lasted. I'm going to attempt to explain in a future post why reality formats and twists seem to work in different markets while they completely fail in others, but that's a story for another day. In short, though, here voting for a U-Turn is both a bad idea for the format itself and, more importantly, not going to work for an Australian audience.

THE MOLE (US, Australia): Bangkok Hilton

 Up until now I've tended to bitching about exactly why challenges didn't work, and how to make them better. This week, I thought I'd take two different variations of the same basic challenge (which is not actually CALLED Bangkok Hilton in either instance, but which seems like it should be given the challenge involves using hotel rooms as makeshift prison cells) and comparing them.
Both of these challenges involve each player being locked in a separate hotel room (with no idea where in the hotel the others are), and having to use an assortment of clues to escape and reunite. However, the clues in one room are usually only helpful for a player in another room, and phone communication is the key to success. And while some of the clues themselves are identical (as these two were both adapted at the same time from a challenge seen in the Belgian version), that's about where the similarity ends. And, yes, this is the sort of instance where explaining the challenge is going to require me to use contestant names. So...

AVAST, YE LANDLUBBERS! SPOILERS LIE AHEAD!

(Please never let me do that again unless I ever get bored enough to discuss Pirate Master, in which case merely discussing it would be a spoiler to all but the sixteen people who watched it.)

We'll start with the lesser of the two versions, from the United States.This version of the challenge was structured very similarly to the original Belgian version, with three remaining players (Jim, Kathryn, and Steven) and an almost identical clue layout. They had ninety minutes to escape, and would win $75,000 (out of a maximum $1,000,000) if they succeeded. Ignoring all of the unnecessary decoy clues, the simplest solution is as follows: Kathryn's exercise bike powers a light in Jim's pitchblack room, which Jim must use to find the graffiti "Juan Guerrero" written on the wall. Kathryn can then look out her window to see a van with a date on it and use it as the code to escape her room. She must collect a package for Guerrero from the lobby and open it to find a small box. Opening it with the key from her room will release the key for Steven's room. Using his room number as the combination for a briefcase, containing the sheet music for Mary Had A Little Lamb hidden inside a newspaper. They must then slide it under Jim's door and have him play it on his xylophone to escape.

There are quite a few major problems with this design. For starters, Kathryn is doing pretty much all the work, Steven's only role is opening his briefcase to find the sheet music, and Jim only has marginally more to do. For a challenge like this to work effectively, true teamwork is required. Here, all we have is Kathryn's teamwork. Secondly, success in the challenge seems to hinge almost entirely on whether Jim can not only read sheet music well enough to play the song, but (as he pointed out) also find the right keys on the xylophone. If he can't do that, then the team is pretty much screwed right from the start, even if they can sort everything else out quickly. Finally, a significant amount of the challenge takes place not in their rooms but in the remainder of the hotel.

On the other hand, the Australian version basically takes the format and reinvents it. Part of that may have been necessary sole because of having been used with four plyers left (Brooke, Hal, Mal, and Michael) instead of three, but the solution itself is a lot more even: Michael's exercise bike powers a tiny LED diode in Hal's pitch-black room, which must be used to read a note next to it. The clue "VCR" is an indication for Mal to play the movie in his - Psycho. Brooke must then turn her shower on and wait for the glass door to fog up, revealing the combination for her safe, which contains a key and "The Birds". Michael must find the combination for his own safe hidden in a copy of The Birds of Australia, which itself is hidden in a pile of books in the room. The clue inside the safe is "Rear Window", directing Mal to look out his to see 1800-ROPE on a van parked outside. The number opens his safe, but Rope directs Hal to a piece of paper attached to the rope on his blinds, with his safe combination. Inside are the keys to his own room and Brooke's, while Brooke's key opens Mal's room and Mal's key opens Michael. If the team escaped within an hour, they would win $10,000 (out of a maximum $250,000).

See? Such an improvement. All four players are stuck in their rooms until the very end of the challenge, everybody's doing a roughly equal amount of the work in solving the puzzle, and the clues are tied together through the theme of Alfred Hitchcock movies (in addition, every room in the hotel had a plaque naming it after one of his works, with the players in the rooms named after clues). The challenge itself already was a good one -- obviously, otherwise it would never have been copied -- but this really is a prime example of analysing a challenge and fixing it to perfection. Seriously, the only bad thing I can say about the challenge is that it didn't take up more of the episode -- and the other two challenges in the episode were very good, too. In fact, it's so good I'm going to do this...