Season 33 of The Amazing Race begins on CBS with a two-hour premiere January 5. The producers were keen to get some established names in the digital world onto the show. Kim and Penn Holderness, who star in popular family videos on YouTube, and Taylor Green-Jones and Isaiah Green-Jones, stars of a wedding dance video that went viral, are among the contestants. So are Anthony Sadler and Spencer Stone, who took on an armed man on a Paris train back in 2015, which inspired the film The 5:17 to Paris, and the singing police officers Michael Norwood and Armonde “Moe” Badger of Buffalo.
Phil Keoghan hosts and executive produces The Amazing Race, and spoke with B+C about the competition series’ long run. He boiled it down to consistency. “There’s a standard that the team has managed to maintain for many, many years,” Keoghan said. “It’s not easy to continue to produce something that still meets the high standards we set. You can’t just sit back and dial it in — you have to step up every time.”
Season 33 had just begun filming when the pandemic hit. Getting the season to air has been both frustrating and gratifying for Keoghan and the producers. “It’s not necessarily something we want to do again,” said Keoghan. “It was just being able to bring the Race back together and finish off what we started. It was a huge achievement in a time when it’s so difficult to find normality in life.” ■
