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TAR 14 in the Media/News/Videos
puddin:
'The Amazing Race' is back with more scenery, fewer days
CBS' The Amazing Race can't match the ratings success of American Idol, Dancing With the Stars or Survivor, but it has outshined all of them in claiming trophies: Race has won the Emmy for best competition-reality series for six straight years, ever since the category was created.
Now, with a 14th edition that kicks off Sunday (8 ET/PT), the series is making several subtle shifts in its formula, which might corral more travel-hungry viewers.
"The show has been on the air for eight years; it needed a new coat of paint," executive producer Bertram van Munster says. (Last season averaged 11.2 million viewers, down 5% from the previous cycle.)
Gone are the lengthy scenes at airport ticket counters as contestants jostle for available flights, a frequent complaint of fans. Cameras will linger longer on the breathtaking scenery that's the show's hallmark.
And in cosmetic fixes, Race's route will be updated with Google maps, the show will sport new graphics and a new opening sequence, and the musical score will get a tuneup. "We had a little too many cymbals crashing," van Munster says.
In all, this 12-episode season travels 40,000 miles in just 22 days, a week shorter than past editions. Racers begin in Los Angeles and hit their first pit stop — Stechelberg, Switzerland — in Sunday's premiere, after they've wrangled 50-pound wheels of cheese down a steep hill.
Then they traipse across Europe and Asia, stopping in India, China and Thailand, before hitting the finish line on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Along the way, the show treks for the first time to Romania and Siberia, where contestants endure a 13-hour ride on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and face a major snowstorm.
"When you go from Siberia, where it's bitter cold, to India, which is unbearably hot, that's a shock," van Munster says. "We really wore these people out."
This season's racers are a more diverse lot: The show's 11 teams include Luke Adams, 23, a deaf college graduate from Monument, Colo., who travels with his mom, Margie, 51.
"We had to work a little harder because I can't hear," said Luke in a telephone interview interpreted by his mother, who noted that their choices were limited in some challenges. But "I'm a big fan and I've been watching since Season 1, and I really wanted to be the first deaf person on the show."
Also on the chase for the $1 million prize: a brother/sister team of Chinese-Americans with Harvard law degrees; a pair of former NFL cheerleaders; two flight attendants; diminutive stuntmen brothers; and Mike White, a screenwriter (School of Rock) and actor (Chuck & Buck) who travels with his gay activist dad, Mel.
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2009-02-12-amazing-race_N.htm
puddin:
INTERVIEW: PHIL KEOGHAN ON PUTTING THE AMAZING IN CBS'S "RACE"
By Jim Halterman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While the fourteenth season of any series is usually time that last rites are being administered, CBS's "The Amazing Race" marches into Season 14 with a renewed vigor and freshness, according to longtime host Phil Keoghan. Speaking from Los Angeles, Keoghan spoke of the endurance of the competition series, how the contestants are chosen and what brings him the most joy in his host role.
Keoghan said that conscious efforts have been made this season to keep the show from growing stale. "The network really wanted to freshen everything up including the graphics and the music; all the dressing elements of the show. And that now with all the other stuff that we've always been able to keep fresh, I think it's given us something that's a premiere show like Season One out of the gate; that's how fresh it looks to me."
"The Amazing Race" has been a groundbreaking show in that it has regularly brought an eclectic group of people to each season's casts. "I've gotta tell you," Keoghan said, "to CBS's credit, they have consistently made quite radical choices with casting [but] the final say goes to Les Moonves and he has an unbelievable eye for talent and knowing what's going to work on TV." Case in point, Keoghan explained that one of the teams in the new season (Margie and Luke) is a mother and her deaf son, who doesn't read lips and will rely completely on his mother to communicate. "It would've been an easy one to shy away from them. Most people would say 'we don't want to get into too extreme a choice. It's going to be too hard for them.' But we've had an amputee, we've had a short person, we've had gay, straight, tall, short. We've had such extremes with the casting that I love being a part of it because I love that we don't shy away from any combination that works." Other contestants this season include a gay father and son, sibling lawyers and shapely blonde flight attendants, who say in the season premiere that they are ready to use their looks to get them far in the game.
While challenges may get bigger and scarier every season (in Sunday's episode, racers bungee jump off the second highest point in the world) Keoghan said there's another aspect of the challenges that appeal to him. "It's about immersing people in some aspect of culture in that place. Those to me are my favorite challenges. Milking a camel or this cheese challenge [where contestants have to carry 200 lbs of cheese down a slippery hill], which was such a huge effort. You kind of throw people something that is inherently part of the culture there... [for example,] they're in Cambodia and they have to go fishing and they have to do it the way people in Cambodia do it."
In terms of the show's popularity, Keoghan shared, "I feel like 'The Amazing Race' is kind of at a tipping point. Before, people would say 'you're that guy from that great race.' They sort of knew the face, knew the show, they'd heard about it but it hadn't gotten to that tipping point where it becomes a part of people's vernacular where it was mainstream or where it was a recognizable show to just about anyone on the street. Now, people get the name right, people have seen it, people say, 'Oh, I know that show, The Amazing Race. I love this team or I love that team.' But the thing I consistently hear from people is we just love it when you just show us the world."
The fact that the race itself literally goes around the world, Keoghan initially wanted to convey the grand scope of that fact at the starting line of the race. He revealed that at the beginning of the series, "I wanted a line that sort of encapsulated what was awaiting the teams and what was awaiting the viewers and I came up with this line. I felt like I needed something to set up the premise. I came up with this line, 'The world is waiting for you.'"
Keoghan added that it's the world that is truly the biggest appeal of the series. "Yes, we have a great show, yes, we have a great cast but what people really love about the show, one of the big pulls or draws of the show is that we're the show that is part of the world and we'll show them the world in a way that they just don't get to see anywhere else in mainstream media."
Another popular draw of the show is the testing that the various relationships go through in the course of the race. To hear Keoghan describe it, it's not just the already weak relationships that are subject to the pressures of the race. "I don't know if even some of the strongest relationships aren't going to be tested somehow during the whole journey because it is very stressful. It's hard enough to take a family trip on the weekend and go away for a camping trip. In a perfect relationship there's still going to be some tension but now you've upped the ante and you put a million dollars out there and you've got other people racing to get there before you... you really create a lot of tension, a lot of energy there that manifests itself and teams really testing their relationship."
Keoghan, who is also an author of the book "No Opportunity Wasted: Creating A List For Life," clearly finds much joy in helping people make the most out of their lives. "It's uplifting. It's invigorating. It makes people want to get out there and do things. There's something very cool about working on a show this long and being a part of something that has that kind of energy." The host also said that he's heard first hand from past contestants how the race has impacted their lives. "I stay in contact with many of the racers. They email. It's changed their lives for the better. The audience loves to see the changes that people go through and the idea that they're pushing themselves. It's a unique opportunity to work on something that actually does something positive, I think."
When asked if he ever stands on the sidelines and secretly wishes he could do the challenges that he sees play out season after season, Keoghan admitted that he's not a newbie at doing extreme challenges. "Since the age of 19, I have spent most of my career doing crazy things. I have an unofficial world record for bungee jumping where nine of us jumped off a bridge at one time. I have my reindeer skiing license, which I got in 1998... I spent three days in a nudist resort [and] I putted a golf ball across Scotland last year in four days. 107 miles. One golf club, many golf balls lost from the West coast of Scotland to the East. So I've spent my entire career doing many of the things that they do on the race."
"The Amazing Race" kicks off its latest season this Sunday at 8:00/7:00c on CBS.
http://www.thefutoncritic.com/rant.aspx?id=20090213_amazingrace
puddin:
Today's News: Our TakeWhat's In Store for the New Amazing Racers
Feb 13, 2009 05:52 PM ET by Robyn Ross
Amazing Race
The 14th installment of The Amazing Race kicks off Sunday (CBS, 8 pm/ET) as 11 teams dash around the world toward the finish line and the $1 million dollar prize. TVGuide.com checked in with Murtz Jaffer, editor of InsidePulse.com and host of Reality Obsessed, to get his take on the teams to watch, what's up with those pit stops, and why patience is the key to victory.
TVGuide.com: Who are your teams to watch?
Murtz Jaffer: There's one team that I'm favoring and that's Cara and Jaime, the cheerleaders from Florida. One is 26, one is 29 [and] typically younger teams win the race. Everybody wants two females to win this show. They're my heavy favorites right now, I have a feeling about these two.
Another team that I like is Tammy and Victor, the lawyers. Victor is modeling his game-play style on Rob and Amber [Season 7]. You drop Boston Rob and I'm obviously going to pick you. I like the fact that Tammy is 26 and Victor is 35, that's a really good age. You got the mature one who's not that old but has still been around, and you have the younger one to dominate the physical. Plus they both went to Harvard.
Mark (48) and Michael (51) Munoz, the stunt brothers, are another team. They remind me a lot of Jon and Al, the clowns [Season 4]. Whenever Jon and Al were at the airport they'd put on their noses and make nice with the ticketing agent and I can see [Mark and Michael] doing a lot of tricks and stuff. [Their height —4'9"] can work for them, it can work against them, too. We'll never know what we're going to get in a challenge with them. They're either going to kill it, and we'll be like, "Oh my god, I can't believe those guys won" or "I feel so bad for them, this is totally not fair." Either way you're entertained.
TVGuide.com: Are there any other interesting teams?
Jaffer: Everybody is going to be talking about Margie and Luke. Luke (22) is the first-ever hearing impaired contestant. Communication is a big thing on the race. Teams that do well are the ones that don't freak out at the ticketing agent, that keep their cool. Obviously Margie (50) is patient, she had to learn sign language to communicate to her son [Luke]. In the pandemonium of the whole, "Let's go, we gotta go to the pit stop," they're going to be more concentrated on doing their own thing. Boston Rob and Amber have long said that that has always been their secret; they just did not care what anyone else was doing.
TVGuide.com: So who's most likely to go first?
Jaffer: Linda (52) and Steve (43), the married couple, are going to be in trouble. Brad (52) and Victoria (47) are also going to be in trouble, once again because of age. On Survivor you can get past age. You have the opportunity to align and you can bring in people to make up for any deficiencies you may have, whether it be social, physical, or survivalist. On The Amazing Race sorry, if you're old you're not going to be able to run as fast. It's over.
TVGuide.com: Can you tell us any other scoop about this season?
Jaffer: Less airports. It gets annoying when one team just kills at a challenge and all of a sudden they go to bed, the airport opens at 7 am, and they're all evened up again. Very annoying, I'm sure, for the contestants and for the people watching. I think that reality shows now, in 2009, are actually learning. And that's a very big thing — not just going with the status quo. The Amazing Race has learned that these airports and conjoined pit stops have to go.
Also, they are going to suffer through blizzards in [Russia] and I'm also hearing that there's going to be Olympic-themed challenges because the teams went to Beijing. Other locations that were featured are Switzerland, Austria, Romania, Siberia, Thailand, and Beijing.
There are no alpha male teams at all, not one. It's such an interesting thing to make a reality show, you have to make it fair and it's hard to answer what is fair. One person could say it's only fair that they have two males on the show because that means that the race wasn't watered down. So now if two older people win, I'm always going to say, "Well yeah, they won that season with an asterisk," because they didn't really have to face two 30-year-old guys. At the same time, you put two 30-year-old guys there and they're going to win every single time. My ideal casting would be two 30-year-old guys that are like Napoleon Dynamite because then you still have two 30-year-old guys but they're not these physical power houses
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Amazing-Race-Preview-1002892.aspx
anon1akacolby:
Mike White's dream is reality on 'The Amazing Race'
The writer and actor got hooked on the show during the writers strike. Being paired with his dad made it even better.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-white14-2009feb14,0,2659399.story
By Chris Lee
February 14, 2009
CBS' Emmy-winning reality show, "The Amazing Race," has seen its share of eclectic contestants come and go over the series' 13 seasons: beauty pageant winners and bickering married couples, jock siblings and even little people. But this winter's installment marks the first time that "Race" has included a "Hollywood star" in its contestant ranks -- even if that famous face hardly counts as a household name. Enter Mike White, the actor-screenwriter-producer-director who's best known for writing hit comedies, including "Nacho Libre" and "School of Rock" (in which he also plays a supporting role). White, a former producing partner of Jack Black, calls himself a "scholar" of CBS' multiple-Emmy-winning reality show and a self-professed "weird reality fanatic" who began his quest to become an "Amazing Race" contestant during the Hollywood writers strike in late 2007. "I couldn't write. I'd been watching for so long, I was just like, 'I want to go on the show!' " White recalled. "I made a tape with a friend and sent it in. It wasn't like I tried to pull rank. We just sent in an audition and they called."
In fact, White, a Pasadena native who earned his stripes as a writer for Judd Apatow's late, great 1999-2000 television series, "Freaks and Geeks," places his burning ambition to be on "The Amazing Race" right up there with his abiding goals in life. "It's definitely on the bucket list," White said over a plate of roasted vegetables at the Brentwood Country Mart earlier this week. "Do 'The Amazing Race,' do a few movies, die happy."
But that doesn't quite explain how the whippet-thin Hollywood hotshot -- whose boyish physical presence and unblinking demeanor can't help but bring to mind the slightly demented naif-stalker he portrayed in 2000's oddball dramedy "Chuck & Buck" -- wound up on the physically arduous, globe-spanning obstacle course/time trial, which kicks off its 14th season at 8 p.m. Sunday.
Before White could take his place at the starting line, he had to persuade producers to cast him despite his professional pedigree; unlike so much programming on VH1, "The Amazing Race" had largely resisted anything resembling "celebreality" stunt casting until White came along (one exception being the casting of "Survivor" alumni Rob and Amber in Season 7). Then, White's original partner, filmmaker Jon Kasdan (who wrote 2007's "In the Land of Women"), dropped out during semifinal callbacks. And in a turn of events that surprised White as much as anyone, the show's casting director helped choose Kasdan's replacement: White's father, Mel White, a 69-year-old documentary filmmaker, author and leader in the gay evangelical Christian movement -- one of the oldest contestants to appear on the show. "I thought I'd collapse," Mel said of his expectations at the outset. "I thought when Michael said go, I'd fall down dead."
As well, Mike White had to overcome his own professional misgivings. "You feel a little weird as a writer of scripted television for many years to say you're a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan. There are life lessons that can be derived from reality television. It was a . . . blast."
It's hard not to harbor certain suspicions about Mike White's motivations -- namely, that his appearance on "Race" is some kind of Andy Kaufman-esque gag -- especially if you are at all familiar with White's view-askew comedy. Plumbing the aesthetic of discomfort for laughs as well as pathos, White's well-meaning but often dim-witted characters tend to find their bliss only after coming through the fire of ritual humiliation (see: Jack Black as a doofus music teacher in "School of Rock" or Molly Shannon as a misguided animal rights zealot in White's directorial debut, "Year of the Dog").
But to hear him tell it with wide-eyed sincerity, White didn't do the show for greater fame. He wanted to go on in large part to shake himself from complacency. "No matter what your job is, to be kicked out of that bubble is a healthy thing. You're asked to do things you'd never do. And the whole time it's slightly embarrassing, slightly humiliating. You get over yourself."
When Kasdan suffered what White jokingly refers to as a "nervous breakdown" during a battery of psychological tests administered by show producers, White had already won the admiration of Lynne Spillman, casting director for "The Amazing Race." She gauged him as someone who "was doing it purely for the love of the show and not for any kudos or fame."
After the two became chummy, White invited Spillman to a party at his house, where she met the openly bisexual filmmaker's friends and family members with an eye toward casting a replacement. Which is when she met Mel White, a prize-winning documentary producer and bestselling writer who ghost-wrote the autobiographies of such religious firebrands as Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. After undergoing three decades of "anti-gay" therapy in conjunction with the church, however, White came out of the closet in 1994 with his autobiography, "Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America."
"He was fascinating: opinionated, complex, sarcastic," Spillman said. "I didn't realize he was Mike's father at first. I tried to be cool, but I was so excited. Mike said, 'You gotta be kidding! He's the only person I'm not funny around.' "
Added Mike White: "To be perfectly honest, I'm competitive. I wanted to win. As much as my dad is spry for someone who's almost 70, he is still 20 years older than the next-oldest person on the show."
Nonetheless, both were persuaded that the experience would be positive and provide for plenty of father-son bonding that occasional lunches and cross-country visits can't approximate. Still, boundaries had to be established upfront. "Right at the beginning, he told me, 'Dad, don't go aggro on me.' I had to look it up. What's 'aggro'?" recalled Mel White from his home in Virginia. "I thought it was agriculture. But it's aggro-vated. He knows I'm a gay Christian activist. I'm aggravated half the time!"
Asked if he learned anything surprising about his son while traveling together under the battlefield conditions of reality television, Mel White grew suddenly emotional. "I couldn't pay for what 'The Amazing Race' did for me, to have this time with my son," he said.
Shooting wrapped in late November, after the racers hit five continents, 15 countries and traveled 30,000 miles. But so far, neither White has seen any footage from the show outside of a quietly hilarious CBS promo in which father and son are introduced simply as "writers" and shown pecking away at side-by-side laptops, doing tandem yoga and tooling around on Segway PTs. Mike White admits he stage-managed the commercial to temper people's expectations. But it seems like he also couldn't resist imposing some small measure of his comedic worldview on the show.
"They always have people doing this sporty stuff like volleyball," he said. "What would be the laziest thing we could do for our promo? Let's just ride on Segways in our neighborhood! I was thinking, 'Let's just do the goofiest stuff possible.' "
mswood:
Here is what Aint it cool has to say.
Hercules Has Seen
Big-Deal Writer-Actor-Director Mike White Compete In CBS’ THE AMAZING RACE!!!!
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/40133
I am – Hercules!!
Mike White is the “Freaks and Geeks” vet who went on to write and star in “Chuck & Buck,” “Orange County,” “The Good Girl” and “School of Rock.” He more recently wrote and directed the hilarious and harrowing “Year of the Dog,” one of 2007’s best movies if you’re asking me.
Dad Mel White is described as a writer, filmmaker, professor, pastor and gay-rights activist.
On tonight's "Amazing Race," the Whites are seen racing against a deaf guy and his mom, a pair of dwarf sibling stuntmen, a pair of sibling Harvard Law grads, a pair of hot redheads, a pair of blonde flight attendants and a pair of twentysomethings from The Bronx.
Have a look at all the contestants here.
Notes on tonight’s premiere:
* The trademark jetliner CGI is gone; the series has a new set of opening titles.
* The race starts in Los Alamitos, Calif., then heads east.
* It turns out that both Whites are gay. I’ve suspected the younger White might have homosexual leanings since I saw the brilliantly creepy “Chuck and Buck,” but I don’t recall him earlier making mention of his orientation. Indeed, CBS’ press materials only identify the elder White as gay.
* The deaf kid doesn’t read lips, and so must rely entirely on his mother to deal with the hearing world.
* The little people, as one might expect, make their livings as stunt doubles for child actors.
* The first road block, involving a dam, is fricking nightmarish.
* Further into the episode, teams must each transport four 50-pound cheese wheels down a steep, slippery slope using fragile antique cheese carriers. Contestants often lose control of these mammoth lumps of cheese, causing the wheels to turn into potentially deadly dairy projectiles as they careen downward.
* There’s more crying when the first team hits the finish line than when the last team does.
* The ending is quite exciting. The last-place team hits the finish line only seconds after a not-last-place team.
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