The Amazing Race, Season One, began its nascent television broadcast on September 5, 2001. During the show's opening teaser a black bus carrying the Race's eleven teams an Amazing Race banner splayed against its upper windshield is skirting across the television screen on it's way to Central Park, host Phil Keoghan and The Starting Line. The bus looms atop the foreground, crossing a dark iron Manhattan bridge; in the background the apocalyptic New York City skyline. The World Trade Center's Twin Towers are standing there like naked idols, staring back at us in iced melancholy. Barely a week later they would vanish in war. Close to four years later amid rumors, pleas, wishes and waits The Amazing Race, Season One, will be officially released on DVD in the Fall of 2005.
Elise Doganieri, Co-Creator and Supervising Producer of The Amazing Race, has confirmed this via telephone. And she should know.
By David W. Taylor (
Email Me)
Reality Reel Media
05.24.05
<img src=http://www.realityreel.com/images/Bertram&elise.gif>
(Bertram van Munster & Elise Doganieri)
If you are an Amazing Race fan of any stripe, Season One is a legend that cannot be missed if never witnessed; if this broadcast is as pleasantly familiar as an old friend... it must be owned, securely tucked away and revealed often. This maiden production was one of those odd hurtling creative epicenters where the pungent mix of teams, locales and unforeseen flukes tumbled and pinched together to create an Old Master's paragon that would never be quite equaled. If so inclined, one could conceivably also call it simple beginner's luck. One could... but that would be way too simple.
Season One may surprise a few neophytes. Even if you were convinced that Rob Mariano was a conniving brute in the just concluded Season Seven, nothing can prepare you for the cold-blooded warp and gaucherie of the First Season's Team Guido. You will likewise never experience an India so eerily claustrophobic nor so strange. No team will ever captivate your heart as the endearingly self-effacing Kevin & Drew. They will become as welcomely familiar to you as a pair of worn sneakers that tickle your feet.
And you will never feel the rush of such an imposing roller-coaster Detour as you will run right smack into within the first hour. You will never see such camaraderie, such tenacity nor such frozen fear. A teams flub amidst staggering fatigue will consume you. It will seem a star-crossed tragedy. You will laugh. You will cry. And I can assure you, you will never, ever behold an Amazing Race Finale and Race to the Pit Stop as magical, as gut-wrenching, as so beautifully poetic as the one that ends Season One. It is a fait accompli for the ages.
