‘The Amazing Race’ Has Won 10 Reality Competition Emmys — But It’s Still Not Enough

It’s been 11 years since “The Amazing Race” last won the outstanding reality competition Emmy. I think it’s time to remind everyone that the CBS series, which just wrapped its 37th season, remains the genre’s GOAT.

“The Amazing Race” has won 15 Emmys over the years — 10 of which were for that top prize. It’s deserved every one of those victories, and perhaps even more. Yeah, I said it. And sure, I’m a bit biased. I’ve been an “Amazing Race” stan since Season 1, and while I’ve added more reality show obsessions over the years (I had my “Survivor,” “Top Chef,” “American Idol” and currently “The Traitors” runs), my adoration for “Race” has never waned.

As a matter of fact, it’s only solidified in recent years as I’ve had a chance to embed inside the show’s production and see first-hand the show’s precise coordination and herculean ability to film a frantic cast of contestants racing all over the world. Almost every day, “Race” is in a new city, filming in as many as a dozen locations. And every single one of those stops requires producers, local participants, game testers, security, props, camera crews and more.

Really, the unsung heroes of “The Amazing Race” are the crew. That includes the army of camera operators who hold heavy equipment as they chase after contestants in order to get the shot. Sometimes that means acting as a producer on the fly, improvising when other teams arrive at the same location and playing dumb when players get hopelessly lost. At the same time, the crew is crucial to keeping the show’s producers informed, via text chain, on what’s happening out there in the field.

Now, try doing all that in a remote country with very little infrastructure — again and again for several weeks. This is an intense production marathon, which is why “Race” crew and producers treat it like going into battle.

“Some of them have been with us since Season 1,” says exec producer Elise Doganieri. “And every time somebody comes to work on the show, they always want to come back. It’s really hard for three and a half weeks on the road. They’re the unsung heroes running right up alongside the contestants, capturing every moment. Nothing is re-shot. It’s a race for $1 million. So we can’t say, ‘Can you run back down that street again?’ You have to be rolling all the time, and you have to be on your game every moment.”

Exec producer Bertram van Munster compares it to shooting a live sporting event every single day. “We travel thousands and thousands of miles around the globe,” he says, and yet it is frequently “a very tight race. Teams will be within minutes and sometimes within seconds from each other!”

I had a chance to speak to van Munster, Doganieri and host Phil Keoghan on location as they prepared to kick off Season 38 — and see how they might try to top this recent Season 37, which featured an ambitious twist in every single episode (and 14 teams for the first time).

“Every time the teams rip a clue open, it’s a surprise,” Keoghan says. “The question was, how can we make the surprises bigger? So right out of the gate, we had the ‘fork in the road,’ which was a new element, where teams get to a board and have to choose to go one path or another. All the way through the race, we’ve made sure that there was some big surprise. One of my favorite moments was when we had a live U-turn vote on the show, and it got a little testy with the teams making decisions about who they were going to slow down at that point in the race.”

It was one of the most dramatic moments in the show’s entire run. But to be fair, when you’re vying for $1 million, you can’t slow down. Same goes for competing in the Emmys: Decades after its launch, “The Amazing Race” still isn’t taking its foot off the pedal.

Watch our panel below: