The days are finally counting down until The Amazing Race arrives in the 2025 TV schedule with the Season 37 premiere, almost exactly one year to the date from the Season 36 premiere. CBS has spent weeks building hype, including teasing the upcoming Fork in the Road twist that may be a step up from the change to elimination legs. One of the biggest twists ahead of the new season has to be the size of the cast, which is the biggest in The Amazing Race history with a total of fourteen teams.
Two of those teams spoke with CinemaBlend about what they see as their advantages, but I'm not convinced they'll count as much with the amount of competition as they might in a smaller season.
The Biggest Season Yet
Perhaps as part of the Season 37 reset teased by longtime host Phil Keoghan, fourteen pairs of competitors were cast for the race around the world. This has been dubbed the "Season of Surprises," so it's a safe bet that a super-sized cast is just the beginning of twists that fans don't usually see in a season of The Amazing Race.
Most seasons of TAR have had ten or eleven teams total, with Seasons 35 and 36 previously tying for the record of most pairs with thirteen. Hopefully the long wait for Season 37 will be worth it by the time the first episode premieres on Wednesday, March 5 at 9:30 p.m. ET on CBS, and fans can look forward to 90-minute episodes again this time around. Just with more competitors than usual packed into those 90 minutes! (You can also stream next day with a Paramount+ subscription.)
I was fortunate enough to speak with two teams who will be competing in Season 37, and while I'm no Amazing Race statistician with all the data for the past 24 years, I'm wondering about just how advantageous some of their advantages will be with the extra competition this time around.
Han And Holden Nguyen's Advantages
Phil Keoghan and members of The Amazing Race's new season were on hand at SCAD TVfest in Atlanta to speak with press, including sibling duo Han and Holden Nguyen. Holden, who is a 22-year-old Stanford student, shared this when I asked what gives them the edge in the supersized competition:
Something that stands out is that we're definitely siblings, and you can see that on the show. I think that, just like your best friend can be your sibling, your biggest enemy can also be your sibling. So it's a double edged sword, and we tried our best to wield it.
As somebody with a pair of brothers myself, I had no trouble understanding where Holden was coming from about siblings as friends and enemies. Han, a 26-year-old former energy consultant, had her own take:
I think also something else is we're very scrappy people, which is something that you're going to see on the race. That's something that we wanted to portray on the show, is trying to break the Asian stereotype. We don't fall within that category, the stereotypical category, and you're gonna see us be creative problem solvers, because we're scrappy. You're gonna see us fight. We're not perfect.
With fourteen teams and 28 competitors, the Nguyen siblings may need all of the scrappiness and creative problem solving they can muster to edge out the competition. Hopefully they're able to achieve at least their goal of breaking stereotypes. The duo didn't know that they'd be part of a season with the largest cast ever until they showed up on the mat and got a shock, and they won't be the only set of sibs arriving on CBS on March 5.
Nick And Mike Fiorito
A pair of entrepreneur/podcaster brothers will arrive on the mat as well, and their thoughts on advantages aren't entirely different from the Nguyen siblings. Nick, 32, said on the SCAD TVfest red carpet:
We are brothers, business partners, and best friends, and I think having that relationship is a pretty unique gift, because we've spent our entire lives together. So we almost can communicate without communicating, right? We know what each other is thinking, so I think that is definitely a skill set. And then the other part of it is as brothers, you can freak out at each other, curse each other out, and then two minutes later, just be like, 'Alright, let's get back to running the race together.' So I think that was an advantage of being brothers.
Mike, 28, agreed with his brother, then added that he "thought we were going to be the most physically strong team on The Amazing Race"... until they saw their lumberjack competitors Jeff "Pops" Bailey and his son Jeff Bailey. Laughing, Mike admitted that seeing the Baileys "completely deflated our egos," but that "fitness was also a pretty strong suit for us." Nick continued:
I think we disagree a lot, but being in business together for a long time, we've learned the art of disagreeing with each other, and that's exactly what it is. It's an art. We have to constantly be able to put our egos to the side, not blame and not try to point fingers. And we're not always successful, but we have some experience, and I think that helped us to shorten that fuse, to be able to get back on track.
So, will either of these sibling duos be able to rely on their advantages to beat out the other thirteen teams in the mix for Season 37? Fans will have to tune in to find out, but other teams include sisters, spouses, parent/child, friends, and more. Stops over the course of the competition include Osaka, Japan; Strasbourg, France; and the countryside of Bulgaria, to name just a few.
Tune in to CBS on Wednesday, March 5 at 9:30 p.m. ET for the Season 37 premiere of The Amazing Race. It will be paired with Survivor Season 48 in primetime and put CBS on the map in a big way for the competitive Wednesday night field on network TV. The reality competition duo will most notably be up against Shifting Gears and Abbott Elementary as ABC's top comedies as well as NBC's established One Chicago block.
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