To offer a dissenting opinion, the actual GAME of The Amazing Race is horrible.
The winner isn't the team who played the best race, it's the team that crosses the finish line first in the final leg and avoided finishing last in all the others. And even that's not accurate, because a team can finish last in a leg and survive if they're lucky enough to do so on a non-elimination leg. In fact, season 5's winners did just that.
To make matters worse, ever since the start of season two the producers have made sure to bunch teams together near the start of each leg. So any advantage gained by performing very well on the previous leg is inevitably lost.
The show itself spends far too much time chronicling the teams' captivating adventures in the airports of the world.
Too many of the show's detours are serial, like last night's zip-lines. The first team to arrive at such detours will always be the first to finish. Yawn. Too many eliminations have been decided by random chance. Unrolling dozens of hay bales and still coming up empty, watching all the other teams come and go because they were luckier than you? Horrible, horrible challenge design. The challenges should be less about performing rote physical tasks, and more about presenting players with open-ended obstacles or goals and leaving players to figure out the best way to proceed. If the show empowered players to get creative, the show would be more compelling.
A race is most interesting when the racers are given the opportunity to change up their order through superior performance. Happening to catch a more aggressive cab driver does not qualify. Rob and Amber's impressive last-to-first (then third) comeback last night not withstanding, The Amazing Race offers very little opportunity for players to excel and gain ground. It's not about outperforming and winning, it's just about not making mistakes and surviving.
