The Amazing Race: Family Edition

Now that there's a chill in the air again, the best reality show, well, ever returns to circle the world this Tuesday, September 27th with the premiere of The Amazing Race: Family Edition on CBS tonight and the long-awaited DVD set of the first season of the landmark show hitting stores.

If you've never seen the race, you're in for a treat on both fronts. TiVo the first few episodes of the new season and start with the original and still one of the best, so you've got the route down. The Amazing Race wins the Emmy for best reality series every single year for two reasons, the two things that all good reality show producers should have tattooed across their knuckles - editing and casting. In the end, that's all it is - can the show give us interesting people and then, through editing, create an interesting story? So far, The Amazing Race has yet to fail.

Because you can take it all in with one long sitting, if you have a lot of time to kill, the DVD set is the best evidence for why The Amazing Race is as strong as it is. Watching it week to week, especially with the charge that the new format gives the show, you'll be too engrossed to really dissect why TAR works. Watching it on DVD, you can figure it out.

One of the first thing that hits you is the diversity of the casting. The producers, including Jerry Bruckheimer found a winning formula from the beginning, pulling on the diversity of the nation. What makes a couple? Man-woman? Man-man? Father-son? Siblings? Every year, they try to cast all the possibilities, knowing that each one provides a different dramatic energy to the show. Too many reality show contestants look and feel exactly the same. TAR revels in the different dynamics between the couples forced to do the same thing. These dynamics have been multiplied, almost to the point of exhaustion in the new family edition, with quartets racing instead of duos. They smartly add new dimensions to the expected results of the show, to keep older fans interested. If the young, in shape, male couple always does well, how will three young men do if they're forced to also carry around their older father-in-law? The casting brilliance continues.

Even more than who they get running for dollars is how the creators of The Amazing Race craft their competition into riveting storytelling. Almost immediately in both the first season and the new edition, the editors create heroes and villains. Watch as they clearly define the relationships, not only that each member of the couple has with each other but with you, the viewer. In the new family edition, the recently widowed and her children are clearly painted in a better light than the caustic family that openly admits to wanting to get in your face. In the first season, the villains (Team Guido) and the heroes (Rob & Brennan) were set up very early, and the editors just refined their characters over the course of the race.

Very few reality shows give you someone you can recognize (most can all find a couple from the newlyweds to the grandparents that look like us) and then put them in situations that you can identify with. Watching an episode (or a season) of The Amazing Race, you'll feel like you're right there with them, wondering how you'd respond to each detour and roadblock. And that's the key - The Amazing Race finds people like you, turns them into interesting television characters through editing, winds them up, and lets them go.

Start running with the new crew at CBS.com.