‘The Amazing Race’ Season 28 Introduction: Get Ready, Get Set, Influence!

By 02/12/2016
‘The Amazing Race’ Season 28 Introduction: Get Ready, Get Set, Influence!

[Editors Note: This article and all others in this column WILL contain SPOILERS. If you have not seen Episode 1 of The Amazing Race season 28, it’s highly suggested you do so before you read the below. You have been warned and may Phil Keoghan have mercy on your soul. And for a reminder of the super cool and descriptive nicknames we have for the teams, check out the coverage of Episode 1. You can also find all of our The Amazing Race recaps right here.] 

Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.
― Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

Hello, my name is Jenni Powell and I am excited.

Tubefilter

Subscribe to get the latest creator news

Subscribe

For those not familiar, I’ve been producing and creating in the digital media space since 2006. I started out in the fan community of lonelygirl15 (RIP Bree) and went on to work on The Guild and many other early scripted web series. I went on to produce the Emmy Award Winning The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Emma Approved. I currently am a producer on The New Adventures of Peter and Wendy and an Executive Producer and Co-Creator on Adi Shankar’s Gods and Secrets. I have a very deep love and passion for what I do and the digital media space as a whole.

But I also have another love. One I keep close to my heart, but that anyone who really knows me has witnessed the great excitement and fulfillment it brings me. I have even converted some people into loving it almost as much as I do. (#SorryNotSorry to my roommates.)

I LOVE competitive reality shows.

So imagine my immense joy, but also slight trepidation upon learning the 28th season of The Amazing Race features 11 teams with at least one superstar from YouTube, Vine, or (insert name of another prominent social media platform or online video sharing site here).

The Amazing Race, for the uninitiated, is a race around the world broadcast on CBS where teams of two complete legs comprised of challenges that must be completed in order for said teams of two to move on in the competition. At the end of most legs, there is an elimination where at least one team is told to leave the race. The first team to arrive at the final finish mat is the winner and receives $500,000.

It’s intense, to say the least and with teams varying from Mothers and Sons, Best Friends, and Newly Dating Couples (they even did a season where half the teams were on blind dates…and a blind date team ultimately won that season), a great deal of the appeal is the interaction between the teams and teammates. Who will crack under pressure? Who will fall flat (sometimes literally falling…there is a lot of bungie jumping on this show…)?

My trepidation comes from the fact that utilizing influencers on the surface looks like it might simply be a ploy by the show producers and network executives to pull in new viewers. Not a bad move per se, and this isn’t the first time influencers have been on the Race. Meghan Camarena and Joey Graceffa have been on the show twice, with their best performance putting them in a fourth place finish. Kevin Wu (AKA KevJumba on YouTube, who still has almost 3 million subscribers, even though his content has been taken down and the channel hasn’t been active in 2 years) also did a season and raced with his Grandfather.

(And Race isn’t the only television broadcast competition reality show featuring social media and online video stars. Both Bethany Mota and Hayes Grier have cut a rug on Fox’s Dancing with the Stars.)

As the season premieres February 12, 2016, it will be interesting to see how the online video audiences of these influencers react, especially as their faves start getting eliminated and the television producers have editorial control over footage that may or may not paint the digital stars in the best light. It’s impossible to consider a situation in which all the different fandoms will be pleased. But I sincerely hope they don’t shy away or keep the edits all positive for the sake of attempting to please everyone and not upset stars that potentially have fanbases larger than the show itself. The competitiveness between not only the teams but their respective fandoms could lead to some hair-flying heated discussions (not to mention fantastic TV), which hopefully doesn’t just devolve into pure trolling.

But that will have to wait until the show actually begins. I’ll be recapping each episode with posts going up every Sunday right here at Tubefilter. The show itself is Fridays at 8PM Eastern / 7PM Central on CBS. And here are the teams along with links to their CBS.com profiles.

Predictions

If the you take the previous 27 iterations of Race into account, pairs made up of parents or grandparents and children struggle, perhaps partially because the parents or grandparents tend to slow down over time and communication tends to curve towards traditional familial power dynamics. Oddly enough, dating couples seem to do remarkably well, perhaps because they’re still in the “honeymoon” stage and give more effort into putting up a good front, even in the face of extreme stress. On the season featuring dating couples vs. people on blind dates, for example, the blind dates actually made it farther on the show than most of the pre-established pairings.

With this in mind and just my pure intuition after logging a few hundred hours of Race watchtime, my money is on Burnie Burns and Ashley Jenkins. Rooster Teeth has been having a banner year already, with their feature film Lazer Team seeing traditional box office success. Another team I’m rooting for is Zach King and his newlywed wife. His Vines are so unique and out of the box. That kind of uber-creative thinking is a solid foundation from which to build a successful run.

What are your thoughts? How do you feel about utilizing social media influencers on a reality game show? What team do you think will go all the way? Let me know in the comments! And we’ll all come back here Sunday to see how everyone did.

Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories

Stay up-to-date with the latest and breaking creator and online video news delivered right to your inbox.

Subscribe