Clyde and I watch a lot of reality t.v.
That’s not to say we scarf down every cheaply-produced piece of schlock the networks broadcast. We love Manor House, but can’t stomach Big Brother. We enjoy Survivor, but despise Fear Factor. We managed to sit through Joe Millionaire … but, in the end, not even we, with our cast-iron eyeballs, could sit through the Fox’s wretched Mr. Personality.
With the demise of the original The Mole, the class act of reality t.v. is, by far, The Amazing Race. Last night’s premiere made a mundane freeway ride to LAX into an edge-of-your-seat affair.
These contestants, in their rush from this castle to that snow-capped mountain, live through real human dramas. They aren’t being asked to eat live grubs or bull testicles. They aren’t scrambling to grab flags off a platform suspended by a crane over a pit of starved carnivores. Their survival doesn’t depend on the fickle whimsy of Internet voters. The producers refrain from indulging in bizarre gimmicks (none of the contestants, for example, wear masks for the duration).
Instead, real people confront real hurdles, obstacles any of us who travel have dealt with: finding a fast taxi, scrambling for seats on a crowded flight, finding your way through a strange place, fussing when sleep deprivation and exhaustion distort your perceptions.
Last night, the biggest winners in my book were the losers: Debra and Steve, married parents (unfortunately a.k.a. “The Fat Couple”). More used to tuning into The Amazing Race than running it, they huffed and puffed their way from one stop to the next, quickly falling behind the younger, buffer competitors.
My heart went out to Debra, whose awkwardness on the zip lines and snowy slopes never stopped her from competing. I know what it’s like to be inside a heavy body that’s at odds with your spirit, and that struggle was evident on her face again and again.
In the midst of all this, her husband, Steve, never stopped urging her on. Upon being eliminated from the race, there was real love — not cheap, Bachelorette-style infatuation — in her eyes as Debra exclaimed, “Thanks to my husband, I’ve done things these last few days that I never dreamed I would do.”
The big losers? The gay couple, Reichen and Chip. Bold enough to lie to America about their maritial status, and bold enough to say, “We’re in this race to make up for every time we felt put down because we’re gay,” their first move, inspired by the fear their new straight friends wouldn’t like them, was to dive into the nearest closet. “We still haven’t decided whether or not to tell the others we’re a couple,” Reichen explained. “Our new allies are straight, and we’re not sure how they’d take that.”
Like most closeted gay men, the real secret they’re keeping is from themselves: they live in denial of the fact that everyone around them already knows they’re gay.
Debra summed it up best: forced to share a hotel room with the pair, she took one look at their matching outfits and the amount of product in their hair and said, “Something tells me those boys won’t mind sharing a bed tonight.”
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