Network Upfront Preview: Fox - We Really Want You to Care About DVR Ratings

Network upfronts – where the networks all come together to announce their fall schedules and pitch their new shows to advertisers – are coming next week, which means the 2013-14 television season is quickly coming to a close.  I’ll probably have a season wrap-up post at the end of May, but I wanted to take a quick look at each network and its shows (and maybe make a few renewal/cancelation predictions) before upfronts hit.  Previously I discussed NBC.  Next up is the free-falling FOX.

Fox announced most of its renewals several weeks ago, so there isn’t much suspense over returning shows going into upfronts week.  But the network has had a disastrous spring and is renewing some of the lowest-rated shows of any of the four major networks.  The already-renewed Tuesday comedies have all dropped to a 1.1 at some point this spring and last season’s two-year renewal for Glee is looking more disastrous by the day.  If Tuesday night’s preliminary ratings hold, Glee’s 2.16 million viewers will make it the least-watched non-Saturday show airing on any of the four major networks over the last two weeks, including NBC’s 6:00pm burnoff of American Dream Builders on Sunday. (Update: Glee dropped to 2.10 million viewers in the final ratings)

The Questions

Fox is hemorrhaging live viewers and, while their Live+7 DVR numbers are pretty good for scripted shows (The Following for one regularly doubles its 18-49 audience), the fact is that advertisers aren’t yet paying for those delayed viewers.  Fox’s audience continues to be the youngest of the four major networks – with a median viewer age of about 45 compared to 54 for the broadcast networks as a group – and those younger viewers are increasingly moving to DVR viewing, on-demand, and online platforms where Fox is not able to monetize their eyeballs.  So the first question is “How can Fox bring back live viewers”?

The second problem facing Fox is what to do with their singing competitions.  Fox has already canceled The X-Factor but the slumping American Idol will be back in the spring.  This opens up three hours for new programming, but only in the fall.  Fox has already been experimenting with short-run seasons for Sleepy Hollow and The Following but are they really willing to dedicate four to five hours in the fall to shows that won’t air in the spring?

The Numbers

Back in September I predicted that Fox would fall from first place in 2012 to last in 2014, owing mostly to disastrous scripted development and the collapse of The X-Factor and American Idol.  I didn’t quite hit the mark but I came pretty close.  In Live+Same Day ratings, Fox is on pace to finish with a 1.74 rating, only about .1 ahead of last place ABC and even that lead is going to be entirely thanks to the Super Bowl  and the NFC Championship game.  Fox will finish last in scripted drama and second-to-last in scripted comedy.  The Live+7 numbers are better, with Fox currently holding a .1 lead over CBS for second place, though that may not hold over the last few weeks.  But sans primetime NFL next season, Fox could very well finish in last place unless they manage to find another hit or two among their new shows.

The Schedule (Titles in BOLD have already been renewed for next season; titles in strikethrough have already been canceled)

Monday –

2013-14 Schedule –

7:00pm – Bones (1.54) – Almost Human (1.73) – Bones (1.54)

8:00pm – Sleepy Hollow (2.25) – The Following (1.75)

The Bones numbers are deceptive because of the episodes it aired on Friday, but I’m still a little surprised that Almost Human was canceled.  It seemed like the perfect filler show.  You can debut it in September or November or February, air it for 13 or 18 or 22 episodes, and it will still probably pull the same ratings.  I can only assume that there were production cost issues at play that made the show less profitable for the network.  Also deceptive here is The Following’s average, which is boosted significantly by the 4.4 rating it received for its season premiere following the NFC Championship Game.  With that single episode factored out, the series averaged a 1.56.  It’s tough to predict Fox’s schedule for the Fall because of how much real estate the cancelation of The X-Factor has freed up, but I imagine we will see some consistency on this night with the only question being whether Bones and Sleepy Hollow remain paired together or if the network thinks Sleepy Hollow is strong enough to carry its own night with a new drama.

Tuesday –

7:00pm – Dads (1.41)/Brooklyn Nine-Nine (1.50) – Glee (1.27)

8:00pm – New Girl (1.70)/The Mindy Project (1.30) – New Girl (1.70)/Brooklyn Nine-Nine (1.50) – New Girl (1.70)/The Mindy Project (1.30)

I have to imagine there will be some shake-up on Tuesday nights in the fall because the spring ratings were disastrous.  New Girl and The Mindy Project both managed to tick up for their season finales this week, but prior to that had been regularly drawing a 1.1 rating and fewer than 2.5 million viewers.  And Glee hasn’t bested a 1.0 rating since the first day of April and would have been canceled without question were the show not renewed for two seasons last spring.  I guess they could continue running a two-hour comedy block here next season, but the ratings will likely be just as terrible.

Dads was one of three comedies canceled late Wednesday night (we’ll pour one out for the late, lamented Enlisted in a bit) and was easily the least-mourned.  Its final ratings are inflated by virtue of ending its run in February, before Fox’s ratings cratered.  When compared with the network average at the time of their finales, Dads and The Mindy Project basically ended up with the same numbers.

Wednesday –

7:00pm – The X-Factor (1.73) – American Idol (2.71)

The cancelation of The X-Factor has opened three hours during the fall, giving Fox essentially limitless possibilities for their schedule.  They could take the easy road and just slot three new dramas into these spots, though that’s unlikely to be successful.  They could move Bones or Sleepy Hollow over to try to build a new night.  We might even see American Idol move in the spring.  The last few weeks have been brutal for what is still the network’s highest-rated show as its ratings have been under 2.0 for the past several weeks.  We already saw Fox move Idol away from The Big Bang Theory in the second half of the spring this year.  They may decide to pull it from Thursday altogether.  There’s even a non-zero chance that Fox cuts it back to one night a week as they did with So You Think You Can Dance and ABC has done with Dancing with the Stars.

Thursday –

7:00pm – The X-Factor (1.73) – American Idol (2.71) – Hell’s Kitchen (2.05)

8:00pm – Glee (1.27) – Rake (0.92) – American Idol (2.71)/Surviving Jack ()

I pretty well covered The X-Factor and Idol already, so I’m going to use this space to talk about Glee.  It’s been falling for a while, but airing after the singing competitions kept it at least competitive.  On its own, Glee has bombed, the most recent episode drawing the fewest viewers among the Big Four networks for any show airing outside of Saturday in a month.  I have no idea what Fox can do with it next season.  The show is clearly incapable of leading off a night and the fact that it will be airing its final season means that it would be a waste to give it any kind of a decent lead-in when you can give that lead-in to a show with growth potential.  The obvious move seems to be to put it on Friday night, but if it can only barely pull two million viewers on Tuesday the ratings are sure to be atrocious on Fridays.

Friday –

7:00pm – MasterChef Jr. (1.39) – Bones (1.65) – Rake (0.92) – Kitchen Nightmares (1.38)

8:00pm – Raising Hope (0.64)/Enlisted (0.67) – Kitchen Nightmares (1.38)

Fox screwed up with Enlisted.  I don’t say that often about network scheduling.  In fact, I’ll only say it once more in this series when we get to ABC and discuss Trophy Wife and Mixology.  Here, though, Fox had a charming and funny series full of established television actors and with an established and popular writer pulling the strings (Kevin Biegel was a writer with Scrubs before running Cougar Town with Bill Lawrence).  It seems like Fox was holding Enlisted back in case one of its Tuesday comedies failed, but none of them really did.  Sure, they were all pulling disastrous ratings by April, but for the most part they were doing okay in the fall.  So when January rolled around and the network wanted a sitcom to pair with the final season of Raising Hope, Enlisted got the call. 

The problem was Raising Hope was basically already dead.  The show received a fourth season renewal almost entirely to make it eligible for syndication (shows with three seasons and 66 episodes aired are almost always renewed for a fourth season to get to the 88-episode barrier typically needed for daily syndication).  It pulled in very weak ratings in the fall airing back-to-back episodes and was basically just playing out the string by the time Enlisted was slotted behind it.  The results were pretty much exactly what you’d expect.  Enlisted lost a little bit of Hope’s lead-in each night, but not so much that there wasn’t the possibility that it could be more successful in a better timeslot.

Then, Fox made a smart move.  They swapped the timeslots for Hope and Enlisted to give the rookie the surprisingly successful Bones as a lead-in and it sort of worked.  Enlisted’s ratings grew from a weak 0.6 and 0.7 in its first two airings to a 1.0 in its first post-Bones episode.  The network then ruined the whole thing by shifting Bones back to Monday one week later.  After that, Enlisted never had a chance and it was pulled from the schedule in April.  I don’t know that Enlisted would have been a hit elsewhere, but it sure seems like Fox did everything in its power to keep the show from finding an audience.

Sunday –

7:00pm – The Simpsons (2.36)/Bob’s Burgers (1.86) – The Simpsons (2.36)/Family Guy (2.38)

8:00pm – Family Guy (2.38)/American Dad* (1.94) – Cosmos (1.61)

Animation Domination continues to dominate the schedule for Fox.  I’m not sure the Cosmos experiment worked well (at least in the ratings, it’s been a critical success) if only because it bumped Bob’s Burgers and American Dad up to 6:00 where they’ve been drawing meager numbers.  I wouldn’t expect much to change here next year, though there have been some rumors that Fox might try to bring live-action comedy back to Sunday.  The last time they attempted that was in 2009-10 when they used the 6:00 hour to burn off the last episodes of Brothers and ‘Til Death and when Sons of Tucson managed to air all of four episodes before being pulled.  Maybe five years is long enough to wait before trying again.

* American Dad will no longer air episodes on Fox but will be moving to TBS.  And Family Guy hasn’t officially been renewed yet but has enough episodes ordered that its renewal is more of a formality at this point.

How close is Fox willing to come to running a cable-like schedule?  Will they air five shows (or more) this year with shortened seasons?  Will they cut back on Idol or find another reality show to take up that valuable schedule space in the fall?  We’ll know just what the network plans to do when they release their fall schedule next week, most likely on Monday morning.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and amateur television critic.  You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

Network Upfront Preview: NBC - Sports, The Voice and Not Much Else

Network upfronts – where the networks all come together to announce their fall schedules and pitch their new shows to advertisers – are barely more than two weeks away, which means the 2013-14 television season is quickly coming to a close.  I’ll probably have a season wrap-up post at the end of May, but I wanted to take a quick look at each network and its shows (and maybe make a few renewal/cancelation predictions) before upfronts hit.  First up is this season’s almost certain victor: NBC.

NBC is going to win the ratings race this season.  It’s almost certain.  Their lead in the same-day ratings is almost a full point over CBS and Fox and they currently lead Fox in the Live+7 ratings by .2 points.*  The network rode Sunday Night Football, The Voice, and the Olympics to its best year in a decade, literally.  NBC last won the season title in 2003-04, when ER was still in its prime and Friends was in its final season.  The intervening years have seen the rise and (not-quite completed) fall of Fox and American Idol.  They saw ABC hit it big with Lost, Desperate Housewives, and Grey’s Anatomy and then crater without them.  NBC, itself, has been filled with turmoil trying to get back to the “top of the rock,” not least of which the many faces of The Tonight Show and the disaster that was The Jay Leno Show.

* The big difference in the gaps comes from the fact that NBC’s most-watched programs do not see much of a gain from DVR viewership.

The Questions

But 2014 is not 2004 and today’s NBC is not as strong as that year’s NBC was.  While it may have a few juggernauts, there are still holes all over the schedule.  Comedy development has been a disaster and, while they’ve seen some modest drama success, the vast majority of the network’s schedule would be generously described as “below-average.”  The good news, though, is that NBC does have some building blocks.  While The Voice couldn’t help Revolution or either of the comedies that followed it last year, The Blacklist has been a legitimate hit on Mondays and About a Boy has been serviceable on Tuesdays.  The big questions facing NBC in 2014-15 are: Will they let The Blacklist anchor its own night and What on earth are they going to do with Thursdays?

The Numbers

NBC’s Live+Same Day average currently sits at 2.44.  Given their recent trends I estimate that they’ll finish somewhere around 2.3, representing a fifteen percent increase over last year and just narrowly besting CBS’s season-winning mark from 2013.  Unfortunately, as mentioned above, those numbers are almost entirely the result of sports and The Voice.  In terms of scripted programming, NBC was far less successful this past year.  Their new drama average is currently 1.65, just barely beating out Fox’s 1.64 to avoid last place and their new comedy average of 1.30 is firmly cemented in the cellar.  In other words, despite finishing in first place on the season NBC will end up with the worst scripted series average of any of the four major networks.  There are building blocks there, but the network desperately needs to figure out how to use them.

The Schedule (Titles in BOLD have already been renewed for next season; titles in strikethrough have already been canceled)

Monday –

2013-14 Schedule –

7:00pm – The Voice (3.71 average rating)

9:00pm – The Blacklist (2.92 average)

The Voice is firmly entrenched on Monday nights, regularly ranking as the highest-rated program of the night.  The big question is whether or not NBC will leave The Blacklist at 9:00 in order to keep winning the night or if they will try to launch a new drama there.  There is some precedent for staying the course.  Several years ago ABC received a great deal of criticism from a certain segment of the ratings pundits for continuing to air Castle after Dancing with the Stars despite losing a great deal of the then juggernaut’s audience.  But ABC has kept the pair together for six years now and Castle has remained steady in spite of the rather significant erosion of DwtS’s audience.  NBC could decide to keep The Blacklist on Monday nights to maintain its strength, but conventional wisdom says they should move the show both to allow The Voice to nurture a new drama and to allow The Blacklist to a feed a lead-in of its own.  The obvious move would be to send it to Thursday night, but that has some problems of its own, which we’ll get to in a bit.

Tuesday –

7:00pm – Biggest Loser (1.94) – The Voice (3.71)

8:00pm – The Voice (3.71) – About a Boy (1.99)/Growing up Fisher (1.66)

9:00pm – Chicago Fire (2.05)

Moving Chicago Fire to follow The Voice was probably the best move NBC made this season.  It resulted in the show transitioning from an average performer to a legitimate success.  I doubt much about this night is going to change, with the one question of the comedies.  About a Boy and Growing up Fisher both performed perfectly adequately this spring.  But following highly-rated premieres, the shows have declined consistently to the point that, removed from their cushy Voice lead-in, I don’t believe either would draw much better ratings than Parks and Rec or Community did on Thursday nights.  This is the second consecutive year that NBC has tried to put comedies after The Voice on Tuesdays and failed to find a hit.  Will they continue to go to that same well again?

Also worth noting is that Tuesdays were an unmitigated disaster for NBC in the spring of 2013.  They were spared last year by having two weeks of the Olympics and I doubt they’ll hold The Voice for late-March as they did last year.  But there’s still going to be two months at the beginning of 2015 when it will be off the air and the network will need to find a way to stay alive.

Wednesday –

7:00pm – Revolution (1.40)

8:00pm – Law & Order: SVU (1.78)

9:00pm – Ironside (1.05) – Chicago PD (1.69)

The combination of SVU and Chicago PD on Wednesdays has been surprisingly (in my eyes) successful.  NBC still finishes in fourth most nights, but the pair are both above-network average for the year and SVU has actually risen in the ratings from 2012-13.  As I see it, NBC has three options with Wednesday night.  First, they can play it safe, adding a new show (or comedy block) at 7:00 without touching anything else.  Second, they can gut the night, moving Chicago PD to Tuesday night with Chicago Fire and hoping SVU can launch a new show where Ironside failed this fall.  Lastly, they can make a big play for the night by moving The Blacklist here, either leading into a new drama or allowing SVU to move back to its more natural home at 9:00. 

Wednesday nights seem ripe for the picking for the right dramas.  Fox has abandoned the night to singing competitions for the last few years while ABC runs comedies.  And the dramas CBS is airing on Wednesday are in their ninth and fourteenth seasons, respectively.  New drama blood could do well on this night, but it would require NBC to take a chance, and I’m not sure how willing they will be to do that.

Thursday –

7:00pm – Parks and Recreation (1.17)/Welcome to the Family (0.93) – Community (1.08)/Parks and Recreation (1.17)

8:00pm – Sean Saves the World (1.02)/The Michael J Fox Show (1.10) – Hollywood Game Night (1.20)

9:00pm – Parenthood (1.27)

“Unmitigated disaster” is the only appropriate descriptor for NBC Thursday nights.  What was once “Must See TV” has turned into “Must Flee TV.”  Please forgive the terribleness of that pun.  NBC debuted three new shows on Thursday this year and not a single one made it to February.  The continued disaster has allowed Parks and Rec to badger the network into a seventh (and likely final) season and may even get Community the penultimate step toward #sixseasonsandamovie.  The obvious move would be to bring The Blacklist to 8:00 on Thursdays next fall, but that would put it head-to-head against Thursday Night Football, which is airing on CBS in September and October.  The NFL will likely draw huge numbers so it will be interesting to see what the other networks try to run against it.  Alan Sepinwall and Dan Feinberg of HitFix remarked (partially in jest) that, were the production schedules able to allow it, NBC might be best off running hour-long episodes of Community and Parks and Recreation along with Hannibal against football just to get all of their low-rated, critically-acclaimed shows out of the way on a night when everything would get slaughtered anyway.  I have no idea what NBC will do with Thursday nights in the fall, especially in the face of the NFL, but what they did this year did not work…at all.

Friday –

7:00pm – Dateline NBC

8:00pm – Grimm (1.43)

9:00pm – Dracula (1.03) – Hannibal (0.88)

Grimm has been a steady performer on Friday nights for the last several years, though it hasn’t shown any breakout potential, whether airing after the Olympics for a bit in 2012 or after The Voice for a few weeks last spring.  Still, it will likely be back in this same spot in the fall.  The big question is what NBC will do with the 9:00pm slot after Grimm.  Two years ago, they slotted their news programs, Dateline NBC and Rock Center in there to no success.  This year, they decided to go with cheap international co-productions in Dracula and Hannibal.  It hasn’t exactly been a rousing success but, depending on the financials, it may just have worked.  I doubt Dracula will be back but Hannibal has a chance, owing to its lost cost and critical acclaim.  I just don’t know if NBC is satisfied pulling 0.8-1.0 rating in that timeslot.  Then again, putting a more expensive traditional program there might be even worse.  There may not be a right answer when it comes to Friday night, but I’ll continue to plead the case of the massively under-rated Hannibal.

Sunday –

7:00pm – Sunday Night Football (7.14) – American Dream Builders (0.88)

8:00pm – Sunday Night Football (7.14) – Believe (1.21)

9:00pm – Sunday Night Football (7.14) – Crisis (1.14)

Nothing really needs to be said about Sunday Night Football except that it’s a juggernaut, and the highest rated program on broadcast television.*  The spring schedule, on the other hand, needs a boost.  American Dream Builders only got to air four episodes being shuffled back to 6:00pm on Sunday nights in favor of more Dateline and it was announced just today that both Believe and Crisis have been pulled from the schedule for the foreseeable future.  Spring has basically been a dead zone for scripted program on NBC since they acquired Sunday Night Football as the only show to perform even remotely adequately has been The Apprentice.  ABC proved this spring with Resurrection that mid-season event television can work, but NBC needs something that will better resonate with viewers.  After all, Believe was meant to be that kind of event programming coming from JJ Abrams and Alfonso Cuarón (fresh off his Oscar win), even if neither one had any input on the everyday running of the show.  Perhaps this is where we’ll see the Heroes reboot or some similar big-name show.

* It may be the highest-rated program on all of television but The Walking Dead was close this year and I don’t have its exact numbers at hand.

So that’s the situation NBC faces going into upfronts: a top-heavy lineup anchored by sports and The Voice serving to mask the troubling numbers from its scripted programming.  We’ll know just what the network plans to do when they release their fall schedule this week, most likely on Sunday night.

Tyler Williams is a professional library and amateur television critic.  You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

A Grand Unified Theory of The Amazing Race or Why I'm Running out of Teams to Root For

The trio of teams I once enjoyed, but now despise.

I don’t normally write about The Amazing Race, even though I enjoy the show a great deal, because I typically find that I have very little to say about the show beyond just recapping the events of any particular episode.  But this season has been particularly troubling to me because it’s been emphasizing some of my least favorite aspects of the show, both in terms of the racers and the format of the race itself.  So I figured I’d use this season (and the last few episodes in particular) to explore my Grand Unified Theory of The Amazing Race and use it to explain why I’m only really rooting for one team anymore this season.  So without further ado, I present to you:

Tyler’s Grand Unified Theory of The Amazing Race

Principle One: It’s a Game

When I say “It’s a game,” I mean that any actions within the rules are acceptable.  There should be no whining or complaining about somebody playing the game using the rules and tools provided.  This principle was most blatantly violated last week by Dan Dave & Connor who bitched endlessly about the fact that Brendon & Rachel U-Turned them.  I get that the U-Turn is a divisive gameplay element and has been since its predecessor, The Yield, was introduced ten years ago in Season Five (it’s hard to believe it’s really been that long).  There are multiple strategic uses (or non-uses) for the U-Turn.  Some teams will use it to stay out of last place.  Some will use it to ensure victory in a leg (as Brendon & Rachel did).  Some would even argue that you shouldn’t use the U-Turn unless absolutely necessary because it could end up backfiring on you.  And those people might end up being right, given that the previews for next week’s episode show that the Double U-Turn will be popping up again.

No matter what your strategic views on the U-Turn, you cannot complain about its actual use as “unfair” or “not right,” as Dan Dave & Connor and their “accidental alliance” did.  You especially can’t play the age card and whine about U-Turning “a 60-year old man” when that 60-year old man is half of a team that has won three legs, has yet to finish lower than fourth place in any given leg, and has pretty well established itself as one of the two best teams left in the race.  The proper response to being U-Turned by an opponent is not to complain about its “fairness” but to race faster so that you’re not behind them at the end of a Detour.

Principle Two: No Moralizing

One of the ugliest moments of this week’s episode came in passing and likely went unnoticed by most of the audience.  It involved Caroline & Jennifer calling Brendon & Rachel “NLUs,” short for “Not Like Us.”  As Dan Fienberg at Hitfix pointed out in his recap, it’s a textbook “page out of Bullying 101.”*  You identify a target who is “not like you,” choose an action or behavior you find particularly appalling, ostracize the target, and then recruit others to join you in ostracizing the target.  Now, I can’t say that Caroline & Jennifer are consciously engaging in bullying behavior, but the fact that they use the phrase “not like us” often enough to need an acronym for it says a great deal more than they’re probably willing to admit.

* Specific examples of “indirect bullying” that we’ve seen from the “Accidental Alliance” this season according to Peter Ross, Phillip Slee, and Ken Rigby:  Refusing to socialize with the victim, bullying other children so they don’t socialize with the target, ostracizing the victim, criticizing their appearance, dress, etc., name-calling, silent treatment, laughing and joking at the expense of the victim.

This year’s teams are providing an extreme example of what it looks like to violate Principle Two.  The simple fact is that, provided everybody stays within the rules and is actively trying to win, there is no “right way” or “wrong way” to run The Amazing Race.  And yet it continues to happen every season that some team gets offended because they were U-Turned or another team took their cab and they try to paint the perpetrators as the morally bankrupt villains.  But there is no right or wrong in the race, only winning and losing and so long as you’re following the rules and trying to be a winner, you’re racing the “right way.”

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t strategic advantages to be gained from bringing moralism into the race.  Leo & Jamal seem to be trying that very ploy, teaming up with the aforementioned aggrieved teams not because they have any particular animosity toward Brendon & Rachel or sympathy for the “Accidental Alliance,” but because they see Dan Dave & Connor and Caroline & Jennifer as the two weakest remaining teams and think they would be at an advantage racing against them in the final leg as opposed to Brendon & Rachel or Jet & Cord.  That’s a perfectly valid strategy, but then Leo & Jamal haven’t really been complaining about any teams playing “the wrong way,” they’ve just taken advantage of the atmosphere.

Principal Three: It’s a Race!

Where Leo & Jamal have lost me is in their seemingly slavish devotion to their alliance.  We’ve seen alliances before.  We’ve even seen lopsided alliances before.  Hell, Caroline & Jennifer helped boost themselves to a fourth-place finish two seasons ago by partnering with eventual winners Bates & Anthony.  But that alliance, as all Amazing Race alliances should be, was both transitory and mutually beneficial.  Bates & Anthony helped them a lot but they pulled their own weight a lot as well. 

This season, however, the Country Blondes have been just this side of useless since almost the beginning.  In the last leg they failed to solve a relatively simple puzzle and needed Leo & Jamal to give them the answer.  Prior to that they failed to assemble a toy donkey and needed Dan Dave & Connor to both show them how to put it together and carry it for them.  Before that, they had to team up with Dan Dave & Connor on a pair of Roadblocks, had to beg the Express Pass out of Jet & Cord, and still managed to finish last in two legs only to be saved by a Non-Elimination.

Yet there were Leo & Jamal giving Caroline & Jennifer another answer despite the pair being tied for the last.  For the record, that was the second time this season that Leo & Jamal have flat out given an opponent the answer to a task when that opponent was the only team left behind them.  Luckily, they’ve managed to avoid elimination both times but in their attempts to avoid offending teams, they’ve forgotten the most important third principle of The Amazing Race: “It’s a race!”  The team that finishes last loses.  So if you’re going to form an alliance or help another team, make sure that you’re getting something back from the exchange.  Don’t just give away the answer to a puzzle.  Make sure that you’re helping teams who can help you back.

That’s my Grand Unified Theory of The Amazing Race.  It’s not complicated.  It’s just meant to remind us all why we’re here: to reach the finish line first.  It also has made this season particularly frustrating.  If you had told me in the premiere that these would be the final five teams I would have been excited.  I never particularly enjoyed Brendon & Rachel their first time around, but I didn’t have any animosity toward them, which seems to be the general response from viewers who knew them from their previous appearances on Big Brother.  That team aside, though, I actually did like the other four teams who are still alive.  But the three teams I’ve highlighted here have all managed to completely lose any sympathy I had for them coming into the season.

With three legs left (airing over the next two weeks), I have only one team to root for: cowboys Jet & Cord, who just might be the best team in Amazing Race history at completing tasks but who have an infuriatingly consistent knack for getting lost.  I could probably be satisfied with a Brendon & Rachel win but I fear it’s going to come down to whiners, bullies, and morons and this season is going to end in extremely disappointing fashion.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and amateur television critic.  You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.