John Seavey

I agree, but again, it's worth keeping in mind that the first three or four episodes tend to be a little bit heavy on the "OMGWTF" mistakes because no matter how much they pre-screen the teams, there are always going to be a few people who just don't have the skills needed to compete in the Race. And since they only eliminate one team a week, you can see a really terrible team hang around for two or three weeks simply because someone was worse than them every time. (Think "selfie in front of train we need to catch". They weren't even the first team eliminated.) Plus, to some extent practice makes perfect. With a couple of All-Star exceptions, the teams going on the Race have never done it before, and watching old shows only prepares you so much. As the teams get more experience navigating airports, negotiating with taxis, completing tasks, et cetera, you can expect them to start looking a bit more competent. Then we'll get a better idea of who's going to be in it to win it.

Well, the thing about stupid mistakes is they tend to get you eliminated, so presumably the teams that make it to the ninth or tenth leg won't be making so many. :) I thought it was a fun episode. Again, I'm loving the lack of mean-spirited behavior; I don't know whether it's because they're all aware of each other's work, or whether they just want to present their best selves in order to avoid losing subscribers, but we've seen a lot of supportive behavior and very little animosity to the other teams. (Dana and Matt had a meltdown, yes, but by Race standards it was pretty mild.) Blair is a little too "fragile flower", but hey, she'll either toughen up or go out. The Race is a lot less friendly to wannabe-Flo types than it used to be. And the challenges were nice. I always love "attention to detail" tasks, because they reward precision and can't just be brute-forced.

As I said, they have done nothing different, collectively or individually, than anyone in previous seasons apart from mention that they're on YouTube. Yet you hate them, even though you (presumably) liked earlier seasons of the show. So I can only assume it's the word YouTube that's driving this. :)

"I don't irrationally hate them, I hate them because I'm watching television and they're talking about YouTube" is not the most persuasive argument I've ever heard. :)

Well, as I joked, I have no problem with giving them flack for things they do on the show. Like, say, wandering completely out of the task and scattering all your puzzle pieces on the lawn like you need an extra Easter Egg hunt challenge to spice up the Roadblock. :) My issue is with the labels like "famewhore" that seem to be labeling them as terrible people for wanting to express themselves through a medium that didn't exist when Nixon was President. Yes, they are doing everything they can to make their antics public. And you know what? If there weren't people willing to do that, we wouldn't have a Race to watch, and that would kind of suck. I don't mind if people complain about bad behavior on the show, and I don't even mind if people say things like, "I don't understand why anyone would watch their YouTube channel," but I think "famewhore" crosses a line into active irrational hatred that I'm going to call people on.

Wow, lots of stuff going on here. Honestly, my first impression watching this episode is that if you cut the introductions where they are clearly prompted to talk about their social media experience, you would have absolutely no idea that there was any gimmick at all to this season. The teams are straight out of TAR Central Casting--you've got a dating couple that have been together for years but just haven't tied the knot yet, you have a father/daughter team where the father is a bit muddled but loves his little girl, you have an adorable gay couple, you have a pair of dudebros who love sports, you have a pair of models, you have two co-workers in a media job who are "fierce", you have the younger sibling pair, you have the dating couple who have been living in sin for ages and are pretty chill about it, you have the single mom and daughter duo...it's pretty much a standard TAR cast just like any other, except for their jobs. (And for those complaining that this cast is exceptionally narcissistic and annoying, I have one word for you. "Twinnies!") The biggest difference I saw from other seasons? No "Mean Girls" BS, no "I'm not here to make friends" hypermasculine douchebags, no instant feuds brewing at first sight. Everyone seems to know each other at least by reputation and like each other's work, they are being very supportive and friendly towards each other, and they're not being overtly rude to the locals or each other because they know that'll probably lose them fans. If that's indicative of the rest of the season, I AM ALL FOR IT. And no, they're not worse racers than anyone else and they're not being treated with kid gloves. Lots of people get lost on the first leg, because they're still getting used to finding their way around in a strange city where they don't necessarily speak the language. (Remember Tokyo in TAR 26?) Lots of people misinterpret the directions and wander around in a daze. ("What's a candela bra?") And in TAR 25, the bottom three teams actually did join in on the four-hour penalty instead of just talking about it. This is a perfectly normal premiere for everyone who didn't walk into it ready to scream "Get off my lawn, millennials!" (And I say this as a forty-year old Gen Xer.) I get that there are a lot of people out there who don't watch YouTube or Vine for personalities, and have a mental wall between "proper entertainers" like Jimmy Kimmel who sits in front of a camera and acts doofy and "YouTubers" like Tyler Oakley who sits in front of a camera and acts doofy. But I'd really like to see an end to the "famewhore" name-calling, because it's nasty and mean-spirited. Let's just settle in, get to know these people, and really appreciate them for who they are as human beings. Then, based on that, we can start irrationally hating them. :)

I don't really recognize any of them either, but then again I couldn't pick a Kardashian out of a line-up and I only figured out who Adele was a few weeks ago. :) I know that these people have fans who really enjoy their work, and as long as everyone's happy, I don't mind.

If you can make a living off of it, it's a real job.

In our house, we describe this as, "If someone is drowning, throw them an anchor." But yes, all good rules.

That's normal--they usually renew the show for two seasons at a time, so TAR 27 and 28 are covered under the same contract. We'll probably hear something not long after 28 ends. I'm not unduly worried--it gets decent ratings, it's not that expensive to produce (and it looks gorgeous for the money, because they're shooting all over the world), and it's the closest thing reality TV has to a "prestige" show. Their stack of Emmys helps a lot come renewal time. They still allow contestants to beg for money, but I don't think many of them still do; most of the time, they're just far more familiar with the expectations of the game and don't use money for anything they don't have to. If you watch the early seasons, you'll see people checking into hostels overnight when they had a bunch, or taking taxi rides even when they weren't required to do so. Nowadays people hang onto their money tighter, and so it's less of a factor. Arguably, the only reason it mattered at all here was that every team voluntarily donated their cash at the end of leg four or five to an orphanage. Without that, it wouldn't have been a factor at all.

Last night's episode was pretty good--no real rooting interests among the chefs, but Alton scrooging it up with the Caroling Bobs was funny, and the sabotages were pretty decent. Highlights were the final round "snowglobe prep station" and the ice luge. Strategy was pretty good--one of my biggest irritations is when chefs decide to spread all the round one sabotages around to "level the playing field", and thankfully Chef L'Oreal understood that you don't want a level playing field. You want it to be much, much harder for one chef than for everybody else, and you want that one chef to not be you. Stacking sabotages is a surefire way to make it through to the final round, and I'm glad someone saw the wisdom of that.

They cannot. It's against the rules of the Race to compensate people with anything other than the cash the production team provides you, and there would be time penalties involved. This came into play back in TAR 14, where Mark and Michael were hit with a thirty-minute time penalty for trying to pay their taxi fare by handing over their Rolex. It's a good rule--not only does it stop the "I'll cut you in if I win" stunts, it also keeps people from packing their backpack with valuable objects and bribing their way to the Finish Line. I think that may have been me, and I wasn't speaking from any knowledge--I was just saying that he seemed like the kind of guy whose parents pushed him to be hyper-competitive about everything. It was in response to someone who said he seemed like the kind of guy whose parents coddled him and gave him an over-inflated ego. Neither one of us has any real idea about Justin's childhood, and those were just jokes. The driving thing is (I'm pretty sure) entirely random. Like a lot of Race tasks, they like to keep things unpredictable so that Racers don't know what to expect, so some Races they'll do a lot of self-driving, others none. It's like eating challenges, heights challenges, memory challenges...they don't want Racers thinking they can reduce the Race down to a system or a set of skills.

They've been bunching people on the final leg for ages now. I think they realized after TAR 1, when the third-place team was still in Alaska when the first-place team crossed the Finish Line in New York, that it was not just undramatic but also logistically difficult to pull off a final leg without putting everyone on the same flight. It's just one of those things you have to be prepared for once you're in the Final Three, that you won't be granted any kind of inherent advantage based on your past performance and you have to race hard and not just assume that everything's going to fall your way and you can send your taxi away without making arrangements for return travel-- Sorry. That turned into editorializing. :) But the point is, it's pretty normal for the final teams to share a flight. How was this not the episode title?

I'm willing to give it a chance. They've had some YouTubers on in the past who weren't terrible, and frankly better this than shoehorning yet more Survivor or Big Brother cast members onto the show. My only wish is that they'd expanded it to podcasters, so we could have gotten Cecil and Carlos from 'Welcome to Night Vale' on there. :)

Hmm. Interesting hair-splitting question: Could you ask a firefighter so long as it wasn't one of the ones directly involved in the challenge? I mean, it was a firefighting academy, I'm sure plenty of them weren't involved in the Race at all that day. Not that it's important--he didn't ask anyone, and it really hurt them. (And it's kind of sad that by that point, I didn't expect Diana to do any kind of decision-making, because any time she tried to think for herself he just yelled at her and told her she was wrong. I'd be that way too--you just want a monkey to help you with tasks? Fine, I'll be your monkey. Don't expect me to chime in when you do something stupid.)