Entries in the Category "the amazing race"
Last night's Amazing Race
above: a Seychellesian tortoise enjoys his 15 minutes of fame
Things you only hear on The Amazing Race (tonight courtesy of Brent):
"The cowboys and the lesbians are back at the place. We had to go get our coconut."
(Does anybody else really want to visit the Seychelles now?)
Racing to "The Iraq" and Back
The newest season of The Amazing Race begins a week from Sunday. I happened to check out the show's website and discovered that one of the teams is a pair of dating models. Oh, boring, right? Every season has at least one pair of dating models. What makes this pair so special?
Well, one of them is this person:
Upon reading this news, my emotions are mixed. Firstly, people who are dumb make me sad. That people who are dumb can find fame and success if they are also beautiful women makes me angry. That this woman became a national joke makes me...a bit amused, truth be told.
That she has finagled her way onto one of my favorite shows ever makes me suspicious. I guess everybody deserves a chance to redeem themselves. However, I'll say this: you better not be in this to extend your 15 minutes, Vanna! The Amazing Race is hard, man, and people who go on the show just to publicize their careers do not tend to acquit themselves that well. Case in point: that girl who was an aspiring country singer. She did not come out of that thing looking too good. And neither did her boyfriend.
How much do I miss the Whites right now?
This Week's Disappointments in Reality TV
If these seem like old news, forgive me. I’ve been writing papers all week and I’ve just now managed to catch stuff up. Who loves the DVR?
Jen picks out greens, intending to over-salt them
My girl Jennifer was eliminated from the first half of the Top Chef finale on Wednesday night. It seemed like one of those inevitable eliminations, having less to do with the food she produced for the two challenges and more to do with the fact that the judges felt it was her time to depart. During the quickfire, guest judge Michael Chiarello told her “I will be stealing that,” and then promptly awarded the prize to increasingly odious Voltaggio brother Michael. In the elimination challenge, she produced one good dish and one that was too salty. Chiarello explained that it was some Napa Valley-originated salt that she used, which soaks into food in an unusual way, or something, that every chef did that the first time they came across this salt. Totally understandable. And, ‘bye Jen.
I’m not saying that any of the three remaining guys deserved to go home more than Jen did—just about everybody heard about both negative and positive attributes of their dishes, even the winner of the elimination challenge, Big Brother Bryan Voltaggio (who was told that he was stingy with his seasonings, incidentally). I want to cry sexism, but actually I think it has more to do with favoritism.
The judges love those Voltaggios, especially Michael, who savors his own genius so intensely that I can’t believe he can taste anything he cooks. Eliminating Jen also ensures some good ol’ dude conflict. Michael, a typical younger brother, snipes at Bryan because no matter how well he does at anything, Michael can’t make up for those two years Bryan was in the world before he got there. He also snipes at Kevin for daring to cook comfort food instead of, like, inverting sauces and pumping helium into eggs and practicing other acts of technical trickery. Almost every week that Michael didn't win, Head Judge Tom! wrote on his blog to remind viewers that even though Michael did something Oh-So-Impressive, it didn’t necessarily taste better than everyone else’s food. Even though that’s something we at home can’t experience, I like that it continues to matter.
I think Kevin deserves the win more, but if Bryan were to win it would torture Michael, so I’m in favor of either of those two. Go team Anybody But Michael!
A stunning upset on The Amazing Race, ahead.
Continue reading "This Week's Disappointments in Reality TV"
Emmys Day-After Recap
I’ve got my Emmy food (pizza and mint creme Oreos) and I’m ready to go!
The Host
Neil Patrick Harris is totally cool. He’s singing and dancing, he’s wearing a white dinner jacket, and I think he just insulted Two and a Half Men. (Theme songs are getting so short, next year’s theme to the show will just be "meh." HA!) Later: I love the way he keeps introducing people from their obscure early credits (“from the 1987 Afterschool Special…”).
Click ahead for much much more!
Continue reading "Emmys Day-After Recap"
The Amazing Race: Strategy, Luck, and The Inevitable Elimination of the Teams I Like
Though I was not willing to admit it immediately after viewing the episode, yes, Mike and Mel contributed to their own elimination on Sunday's episode of The Amazing Race. But they were not entirely and completely at fault. Fourteen seasons of this show have taught me more than a little about how it works.
Mistakes made by Mike and Mel
- They lost the mad dash for cabs getting out of the airport. This perhaps resulted in their unwarranted attachment to the cabbie who eventually picked them up and proceeded to lead them down blind alleys for the rest of the leg. They very much should have ditched that guy at the first available opportunity.
- They didn't listen to the people who told them the gorilla statue they were supposed to find was in a zoo; they did, however, listen to people who said the gorilla was on a beach.
- They let themselves get driven by their bad cabbie all the way to the beach.
Understandable mistakes made by Mike and Mel (places where their logic didn't serve them)
- Apparently, the first few people who they asked about the gorilla said, "I don't know, the zoo?" making the guys think it was a default guess; assuming it wouldn't be that obvious, they sought a different answer.
- They noticed other teams heading in the opposite direction as they were headed, and made a conscious decision not to follow the group like lemmings. This is an admirable move in a race where contestants frequently tail each other to avoid reading maps or figuring out clues for themselves. This time, it just made the Whites independently wrong.
Things that were totally not their fault
- The leg was designed with no thought-intensive challenges or tasks, which is how the dumbest teams managed to finish in top spots. I don't mind the physical challenges--I think the show needs them--but they need to be in combination with tasks that require logic and reason and problem-solving skills. Otherwise, you might as well just hand the million dollars to the dudes with the biggest muscles. (Which, admittedly, happens most seasons anyway.)
Anyway, even though I can acknowledge that a couple better-made decisions would have saved them, I will continue to find their loss controversial. They were such cool guys, good-natured, with no sense of entitlement whatsoever. In a previous episode, Mel was a bit short with a cabbie, asking him to hurry up; almost immediately, he confessed to the camera that he'd feel bad all day. This attitude was clearly sincere because we saw it again in this week's episode. Despite being significantly behind all the other teams, the Whites made it through the designed-for-frustration tea store task NOT by being bastards and demanding that everyone speed them through it, but rather by being silly, goofing around with the store owners.
You'll be missed, gay minister and bug-eyed, screenwriting son!
Other Amazing Race observations:
- Why is everyone getting into cabs without asking if the drivers know how to get to X location and Y landmark, and then complaining that the driver doesn't know what or where it is? Have these people not watched the previous seasons?
- Tammy and Victor are annoying, but there's a reason they're front runners. In addition to being fairly physically fit (they look like gym rats), they have never once been caught misreading a clue. Lawyers love details!
TV Recommendation: The Amazing Race
To anyone who's never given this show its proper chance to enchant you: the new season of The Amazing Race has begun and it's better than ever. I'll save for later a more exhaustive review of the awesomeness that is this show; but please consider these points:
For those who have trouble catching the show in its usual 8pm Sunday time slot, this season, it has been rerunning at 8pm on Friday nights on the Travel Channel.
This season features competitors like teeny stuntmen brothers, a deaf kid and his mom (who are dominating thusfar) and Mike White, the guy who wrote School of Rock, racing with his gay minister dad.
In the first episode, the racers had to transport gigantic wheels of cheese down a slippery hill in the Swiss Alps. Watch and enjoy.