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.
A lot of The Amazing Race's new COVID-era rules were "just common sense stuff," insisted longtime host Phil Keoghan. Vaccines were required for the cast and crew, as was mask-wearing during most travel. Testing was frequent and social distancing a must, as was a sense of teamwork that had everyone leaning into each and every protocol.
"If you've got one person in a production who gets a little lackadaisical and who decides, 'Oh, what does it matter if I just step outside the parameters and not follow protocol?' That one person can have such a detrimental effect on the rest of the production," noted Keoghan. "And so people took that very seriously on the race, which I'm really proud of."
With four different COVID-swabbing teams traveling with the group, "We did have testing around the clock," co-creator and executive producer Elise Doganieri told Variety. Plus some strict no-sightseeing rules for production. "So literally, you're not going out to dinner," she continued. "The crew on your down day, you're just staying in your room."
While the world was, indeed, still waiting for the seven returning teams (two pairs had to drop out during the nearly 19-month layover), in order to travel safe production got very selective with the pit stops. "A lot of fans said, 'If it's so dangerous to go around the world and travel, why don't you just do the show in the United States?'" Keoghan shared. And each time the native New Zealander gave the same response: "Well, going to certain states in the United States was more dangerous than going to some places in the world."
In fact, with their carefully curated trek through Europe, which included Switzerland, the French island of Corsica, Greece and Portugal, "If you speak to the cast, they will say, 'I felt safer being on this race in a foreign land than I have felt in my own state in America,'" said Keoghan. "And they're right."
Tasked with plotting a new course following their first three episodes in the United Kingdom, "I picked a route that was mostly in remote areas or small cities," co-creator and executive producer Bertram van Munster told Variety. "We looked very carefully so we could do two or three shows in a country, which we normally don't do. These were all handpicked areas where they had the least amount of COVID, where we had freedom to go into a lot of areas where there's nobody there."
That meticulousness made it possible for contestants to still very much experience the promised race around the world. "You have to be more methodical about where people go," explained Keoghan. (As in, don't count on watching racers squeeze their way through the crowded streets of Kolkata.)
Still, he continued, "there are public places where you can have distance. It just meant that we didn't want to put people in a congested place where you're suddenly surrounded by thousands of people in a very confined space. We just took that part of it out."
Also Phileminated: Hours spent in airports scrambling for the fastest possible flight. To eradicate the greatest risk of exposure, racers and production flew together on a chartered 757. "It actually opened up a whole new world for us of how to do this in a very different way, but still have the same feel and energy," Doganieri explained to Variety. "It created a close race every single time that plane landed in the next city."
There's a reason Keoghan advised contestants "For God's sake, use your time wisely and become the next [Formula One World Champion Max] Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton and learn how to drive a damn car, will you?" ahead of the shutdown. Because, yes, the enhanced safety of racers driving themselves means viewers will have more opportunities to wonder why the f--k no one knows how to drive a stick shift or read a map.
"There is some driving. And there is some disastrous driving," admitted Keoghan. "When we say to people, 'Do you know how to drive a stick?' and they say, 'Yes,' what they really mean is, 'No, I have no clue.' The Amazing Race, I can tell you this, has replaced more clutches and burned out more clutches than any other reality show. Period. Bar none."
That's not to say other forms of transportation have been eliminated from the race. "Well, we could take public transportation like taxis, but it would just mean that we would need to know that that taxi driver didn't have COVID," explained Keoghan. "You're taking out some of the randomness."
In other words, anyone that came within breathing distance of contestants or crew had their nose swabbed and arm jabbed. "Everybody that worked on our crew, every judge, every person that you'll see around the contestants has been tested and vaccinated," Doganieri insisted to Variety. "That was just part of our strict protocol rules, but it will feel and look like The Amazing Race. You really won't feel any different from what you're seeing."
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."