Thursday, December 18, 2014

The World is Waiting for You: A Brief Obsessive Guide to The Amazing Race


Still the best/only non-Bigger-than-Jesus show logo.

Here you go. (PDF, 1.36MB.)

I was planning on waiting until next week to release this, but with recent events we totally need a pick-me-up right about now. Consider it an early Christmas/on-time Hannukah/late Ramadan present. And so, to celebrate the finale of The Amazing Race's 25th season, it's the next in my series of reality show challenge guides. It's not quite complete because there are seasons currently airing and one that's finished too recently to get done in time, but they'll all be added in later versions. (I'll also hopefully be back sometime next week with the latest in my other ongoing series of posts, analysing and criticising said 25th Amazing Race season. Because as much as a whole bunch of things worked, a whole bunch more didn't.)

Which brings me to the other big news I was hinting at (if you came here just because of the guide, feel free to skip this bit): This is the last full-show guide I'll be releasing. From here on out, I'll be releasing seasons individually and combining them into a single giant compendium, allowing me to cover smaller shows without feeling like I have to come up with a way to justify picking, like, The Quest (delightful) over Big Brother (...not delightful). And when I say "giant", I mean it: including rewriting the old guides into a consistent format, the list of shows I want to get done is currently at over 130 entries and being added to all the time. The actual format is going to be almost identical to the one used for this Amazing Race guide, partly but not entirely because after watching that much of the show I have no burning desire to ultramarathon it again for a little while, and the only non-visual change is (obviously) removing the location column.

So that's where we stand right now: with the promise of more output, even if still only occasional, but also with more reason for all of us to keep remembering this blog exists. And that can only be a good thing.