A new article features information from ‘Amazing Race’ Producer Bertram van Munster and how each season of the show is planned.
When contestants on CBS’ Emmy-winning reality competition series “The Amazing Race” sally forth on their globetrotting adventures, they retrace the steps of series co-creators Bertram van Munster and his wife and business partner, Elise Doganieri.
On Tuesday, Dec. 28, the show features expanded scenes and unaired footage from the first six episodes of the show’s current incarnation, “The Amazing Race 6.”
The show, hosted by Phil Keoghan, sends two-person teams who have some prior relationship, whether romantic, familial or friendly, on a round-the-world race. They negotiate trains, planes and automobiles — along with buses, bicycles and horse-drawn carts — as they rush to dodge elimination by not being the last team to arrive at designated “pit stops.”
Threatening to trip them up on each leg are challenges ranging from the mental to the physical and the gastronomic. Competitors have had to scarf large amounts of caviar in Russia, assemble furniture in the world’s largest IKEA in Sweden, wrangle goats onto boats in Egypt and lug huge cuts of beef in Uruguay.
“It takes between three and five months, realistically, to plan a season,” Van Munster says. “This last one, season seven, I did in 10 weeks, which is incredibly fast. I go around first, lay the whole thing out with Elise. She does half the world; I do the other half. We do our thing, then we put the creative together.
The entire article can be read here
Wait a second. A FOX reality show runs afoul of an assortment of advocacy groups who say that the show makes a mockery of their lifestyle and is ultimately trashy and exploitative? Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.
Adoption groups are — shockingly — unhappy that FOX is moving forward with plans to air the audaciously titled “Who’s Your Daddy?,” a reality special in which a woman attempts to pick her biological father out from a group of anonymous strangers trying to trick her into accepting their claims of paternity.
The Los Angeles Times reports that a loose coalition of adoptees, adoptive parents and birth parents is attempting to reach a large enough mass that FOX will be forced to cancel the broadcast, scheduled for Monday, Jan. 3.
“This is a new low for the FOX network,” writes David Youtz, president of Families With Children From China, in a letter sent to FOX president Peter Chernin. “It’s hard to imagine a more callous kind of exploitation than the treatment of this most private moment as a crude entertainment.”
Critics of the show are filling FOX in-boxes with angry e-mails. While it’s unlikely that any of the groups have seen the special, they’re confident that any show in which men attempt to lie to an adopted woman in the hopes of scoring a $100,000 prize probably won’t be handling the issue in the most sensitive way possible. Some groups also take exception to the fact that promos for the show say that the woman will finally find her “real dad,” somehow implying that her adoptive dad was less real than a man she’s never met.
“It takes a deeply intimate, important personal experience and trivializes it, turning it into a money-grubbing game show,” Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, tells the Times.
In a statement to the paper on Tuesday (Dec. 21), FOX executives admitted that while the title seems trashy, that’s just a hook to get fans of trashy TV to watch the special.
“It’s not the producers’ or network’s intention to offend anyone, but clearly the title of this special is attention-grabbing — possibly contributing to controversy,” the statement says. “It is not indicative, however, of the special’s actual content. The willing and informed participants are some of the millions of adopted Americans unable to reunite with the biological parent[s]. They seized the opportunity to participate and the result is compelling.
“It is also important to note that this special in no way detracts from the relationship between adoptive parents and their children,” the statement continues. “In fact, most participants clearly state that they consider their adoptive parent[s] to be their ‘real parents,’ but they are curious about their family of origin.”
A Jan. 2 protest has been played by Ron Morgan, a San Francisco adoptee who will stand in front of Fox Television Studios with a sign reading “Honk if You’re My Daddy.”
Assuming the show airs, it will be hosted by “All My Children” vet Finola Hughes.
Sharon Warren, currently earning raves for her feature debut performance in “Ray,” may be ready to move to the small screen.
The actress, who came out of nowhere to stake a position in most Oscar buzz discussions, has signed a talent holding deal with CBS. The network will attempt to work Warren into a pilot for 2005.
Warren’s performance as Ray Charles’ determined and independent mother Aretha Robinson earned her the Boston Film Critics’ prize for outstanding supporting actress. She earned the part after going to an open audition for “Ray” at an Atlanta hotel, according to The Hollywood Reporter. At the time she had neither an agent nor a manager.
“Sharon had no professional experience in film or TV, but she possessed a huge, burning talent that matched Aretha’s intensity,” says “Ray” director Taylor Hackford in the coffee table movie tie-in “Ray: A Tribute to the Movie, the Music and the Man.”
Now repped by an agent, Warren just finished work on Disney’s basketball flick “Glory Road.”
Credit: Zap2It
