Ummmm sorry about that.
Chiled - the southern pronounciation of Child
and “paultry *amount * per day” not about.
Just correct other freakouts at will. Thanks.
I missed the first season, but have been hooked ever since then. It is my favorite television show, reality or not.
Here is the official website, showing the teams.
You don’t need to know anything at all about previous seasons. The only enjoyment it adds is comparing competitors to ones on previous seasons. It’s sort of like Survivor in that way.
The concept is simple. It is a race, done in stages. The competitors are in teams of two – friends, lovers, spouses, siblings, etc. They strive for a diverse set of teams. One of the attractions of the show is to watch how these two people who know each other quite well, get on each others nerves. You know the old saying that if a couple can wallpaper a bathroom together without getting divorced, then they have a good relationship? Amazing Race is like that, only orders of magnitude greater in stress.
Each stage of the race has a series of checkpoints that each couple must reach. At the checkpoint they get the instructions on where the next checkpoint is, and what they have to do when they get there.
There is usually a physical task at each checkpoint. This can range from bungee-jumping to digging through a pile of cow manure to kicking a soccer ball. One non-physical task that sticks out in my mind is where they entered a crowded ballroom with people wearing Marti Gras style masks, and the contestants had to essentially play the game of memory to find matching masks.
Some checkpoints have a “detour” option, where each team can decide which path to take. It’s usually a choice between a safe-and-relatively-easy but time consuming task, or a difficult-and-strenuous but potentially very quick task. Sometimes the team tries one choice but gives up and then has to do the other task.
Some checkpoints require both team members to accomplish the task, and others require the team to make a choice of which person is going to attempt it.
There is another option called the Fast Forward. It can only be used once per team. What it provides is a method for a team that is hopelessly behind on a race stage, to save their skin by bypassing all the checkpoints for that stage by going directly to the end of the stage by accomplishing a different objective. However, if another team has beaten you to the Fast Forward during this stage, you’re screwed.
I’m sure there will be others here to come along and fill in the gaps of things I’ve forgotten to mention.
And here is a site that has FAQs about The Amazing Race which may clear some things up too.
On preview, I see that I’ve been beaten to this checkpoint… but the day is not yet done! 
One thing I didn’t mention is the race dynamic of “bunching up”. It can be either really irritating or invigorating depending on if you’re rooting for the lead team or not.
A team can have a substantial lead, only to see it whither away at an airport as all the other teams arrive to catch a flight to their next destination.
Also, approach the show like you’d approach a book. Let the first couple of chapters lay out the characters and set the pace.
After a few teams are eliminated and you discover who you like and who the loud mouthed harpies are you can settle down and root for someone.
Wow, it all sounds very exciting. Thanks, everyone, for taking so much time to help a newbie!
It depends. Most clues are very specific about what type of transportation you can take – taxi, bus, train, etc. If you misread the clue, you’ll get a time penalty. One team in season three accidentally took a taxi to the Pit Stop instead of walking, and the penalty dropped them from first place to last. (They were Philiminated.)
But if there’s no specific instructions, anything goes. The airport scenes are always exciting because there’s always one team who takes a riskier flight that arrives sooner, but has a really short connection somewhere. Last year, two teams tried to take a shortcut through Paris, and had less than an hour to make their connecting flight from a DIFFERENT AIRPORT. Unfortunately, they ran into traffic…
I’m wondering how the “Yield” option will work this year. What’s to stop all the other teams from ganging up on one team they don’t like, and delaying them by ten hours? I guess we’ll find out!
Philiminated?
Since I don’t see where this has been covered explicitly, some times the path is defined most of the time it isn’t.
Some times it’s like “Go to the Randomtown Train station, then take the train to Secondtown.” But more often it’s at the like at the CN tower, “Go to the Taj Mahal” and all the little things like walking, taking a taxi, or taking the subway, not to mention which Airport and airline they choose make all the difference. in who gets their first. Then once they get to the main location all the little tasks and detours start
Well it hadn’t been covered explicitly when I started typing. :smack:
Phil Keoghan is the host, who says to the last team arriving: “I’m sorry but you’re the last team to arrive. You’ve been eliminated.” (or words to that effect).
Liberal - A word of warning. While this show is a little more honest than the likes of Survivor, don’t kid yourself…it ain’t a fair contest. The biggest issue, of course, is the bunch-up points, which can happen at any time and which there is absolutely no recourse for. Getting the Fast Forward is often a matter of pure chance (especially if more than one team is after it), and it too is often evaporated by a bunchup. In fact, there are a lot of tasks that hinge almost entirely on blind luck, including the unversal one, airline tickets.
Probably the most serious shortcoming, however, is the utter lack of consistency in the rules. I’ve seen at least three teams completely miss a task and get slapped with only a token penalty, while another was not allowed to finish at all and got sent back. I’ve never seen anyone outright disqualified no matter how serious the infraction. There seems to be no standards whatsoever regarding hindering or interfering with other players (there was a particularly flagrant example of this in the first show). As far as I’m concerned, a contest without consistent, understandable rules has no legitimacy.
When Blake and whatshername won the third one…this after hours of horrible TV on her part and cheating on a detour with a wrist-slap penalty…I just couldn’t watch any longer.
ArchiveGuy - Yeah, well, that’s one of those things that they have to accept. I really wish they’d somehow slow down the pace when they get to points of particular interest…a trip Nelson Mandela’s cell shouldn’t be done in half a minute, fer cryin’ out loud. But that’s how it’s set up, they know it going in, and do they want the million or not?
To answer a few questions that I didn’t address in my first post (which really only provided the “introductory information”)…
**What makes it so great? **
To me it is several things. First, unlike every other Reality show I can think of, you are part of a team. Your partner is always there with you, unlike most shows where it is “every man or woman for themselves”. (Well, usually your partner is with you… there have been a few “interesting” developments in earlier Races.)
Secondly, each team is (for the most part) in control of their own destiny. In Survivor (to use the archtypical Reality show for an example) even though there are challenges and tasks, your fate is really in the hands of everyone else. You can do everything perfectly and still get voted out simply because no one else likes you.
In The Amazing Race you can be as disliked as you want and, as long as you are racing well, it doesn’t matter. The most disliked team in the first season came in third (and would have done better if they hadn’t had a bad flight). Probably the most disliked Racer of all time was on the winning team for the third Race.
(This is why some of the long-time fans are a bit upset with the introduction of the Yield. This is the first time that teams have been able to directly affect each other.)
Plus it’s really fun to watch the looks on Racer’s faces when they discover they are going to have to walk barefoot through a cave infested with rats or whatever.
And it can be entertaining to watch some teams self-destruct under pressure.
If it’s a race, do they have to take the exact same paths or can they veer?
It depends. Let me give some examples from the first Race.
In one leg, the teams have to travel from Paris to La Baux (south of France). Now, they can go the entire way by train. But, if they get off the train about halfway they can take a taxi the rest of the way and save a lot of time. Some teams did this and made major jumps in their placement.
However, on a later leg, the instructions specifically told them to take the train from one city to the next. Some teams took a taxi and were penalized.
And, just as an observation, some of the air travel connections these people come up with have teams flying all over the place in every direction.
Is it too late? Do we need background from prior years?
Not really, you just won’t understand what us old-timers are talking about when we say something like “Kevin and Drew could have beat these people blindfolded” or “She whines more than Flo!” (Shut up, Flo!) or when we complain about things like the Yield above.
If you really care, I have recaps of the first two seasons on my site (linked above). Or, Television Without Pity has extremely entertaining recaps of all four (with a fairly high dose of snarkiness added for good measure).
Nitpick - Flo and Zach won the third Race. Blake and Paige came in third in the second Race.
Also, if the cheating on the Detour you are talking about is the one I am thinking of (having someone tow them instead of rowing the boat themselves) the penalty seemed small because every team in the Race managed to screw up somehow and get a penalty that Leg and so it was pretty much a moot point.
Another thing… sometimes for certain legs of the race, they’ll give them all cars and the directions will say “Drive to ThisTown and find the Castle of the Brothers Grimm (or whatever).” Once there, they’ll find directions for the next activity.
Of course, they’re in some foreign city (where they drive on the “wrong” side of the road), and all they have is a map.
One drives while one reads the map. The two members of the team will usually end up fighting about who can read a map better and who can drive better, which makes for a lot of fun for us. It’s also funny to see them trying to outrun fellow Racers in cars alongside them, while making nasty comments about them.
Yes, I’m evil. 
Thanks for that link, Algernon. I’m going to start out rooting for Charna and Mirna - they’re from where I live in Maryland!
Another thing to expect…height.
Just as Fear Factor seems to introduce a new way to eat worms each week, somewhere along the way Amazing Race will introduce height.
Bungee jumping may be passe these days, but it’s still almost guarenteed to pop up somewhere in TAR.
Another example: Your next clue is 20 miles from here. You can take a bicycle down this dirt road, or you can get in this plane and a pilot will fly you there.
Well, he’ll fly you there at 7,000 feet…here’s your parachute.
Actually, an acquaintance of mine is on this new Amazing Race! Marsha is a nice and smart and gorgeous girl I went to law school with at UF, and she is on a team with her father, Jim.
This girl invited me to parties at her house, and she got the highest grade in our Contracts class. I’ve never watched Amazing Race or any other reality shows, but I’ll definitely tune in to see what she’s up to, and to root for her. She’s really a great girl.
This is neat. I can point at her and say, “I’ve read the posts of a person who knows that girl!”
Thanks to Liberal for asking the questions and thanks to everyone for their great answers. I’m psyched!
Well, Derek & Drew were only a mile or so away from the Roadblock, and the could have made it if Ken & Gerard were still wandering around aimlessly…but what were the other three you’re talking about? I don’t remember a single task which was skipped, ever – except Nancy & Emily, who got a 24 hour penalty (which eliminated them) and a few teams who were lagging so far behind, they would have lost anyway.
Ah yes, the evil Guidos. Well, I think they were still pinning down the rules during the first race, and now they’re a lot more specific about what can & can’t be done (which is why the clues have become a lot more direct – “take a bus to here, get off and walk to there” – instead of the more cryptic directions the first race started with.) For what its worth, the teams made the flight even after the Guidos tried to block them; if they had missed it, there might have been stricter consequences. Of course this is one of those controversial moments that TAR fans have argued about for years.
So? Did she win?