In late February 2020, the first place team checked into the third pit stop—an undisclosed location in Glasgow, Scotland—on a race around the world. Eighteen months, a number of days and a few hours later, they, along with six other teams, left from a location in Zurich, Switzerland, after what was undoubtedly The Amazing Race's longest pit stop ever.
"It was so weird because I'm standing there for the restart and it's like no time had passed at all," the Emmy-amassing series' longtime host, Phil Keoghan, recalled to E! News of resuming work on season 33 (premiering on CBS Jan. 5 at 8 p.m.) after their lengthy COVID-induced pause. "And then you process what's happened in that 19 months. And it's so much."
What started with weeks of second-guessing ("Now it's easy to say, 'Oh, it was the right decision,'" said Keoghan about being one of the first reality shows to pull the plug on filming. "But at the time, you can understand why some people were like, 'Are you sure we need to do this?'") bled into months of simply waiting and hoping as the entire world shut down.
Finally, as other series began to make their return—including Keoghan's other CBS reality project, Tough as Nails—The Amazing Race team was able to borrow those blueprints and create their own map to navigate this new normal.
"You don't want to come back in a rush and not get it right and then have a second shutdown," Keoghan explained of their "slow burn" of a return. "It had to be absolutely bullet-proof this plan of bringing people back a second time, a second round of sacrifices, a second round of leaving your families, making adjustments to your jobs. You do not want to be the person who says a second time, 'Oh, hey, by the way, we've got to shut it down again.'"
And of course their series—which sees competitors, say, assisting with a wedding procession in Agra, India, or searching through the crowds at a silent disco in Dubai—had a unique set of challenges.
"It's one thing to set up a world in a bubble in one place and everything is shot in that one bubble," noted Keoghan. "But Amazing Race is a series of bubbles. And when you're in the bubble you're safe, but what happens between those two places with public transportation, with traveling on planes or in vans—all of those logistics that are another layer. So that's where it took more time to get Race up and running."
Here's how they managed to travel safe.
After 20-plus years, 32 seasons and 15 Emmy wins, avoiding any significant U-turns to the series was nearly as crucial as returning everyone home safely. "The format that Elyse and Bertram came up with from day one works," stressed Keoghan. "So don't mess with the format."
But having taken just a few COVID-necessary detours, he feels confident they won't be grounded in future seasons.
"We're still going forward with trepidation always because you never want to get ahead of yourself and think you've got it all figured out," Keoghan detailed. "But I think we've proven that we can do it safely and effectively by following the rules and everybody working together as a team and making certain sacrifices. So we've proven that we can do it once, that means we can do it again."