The Amazing Race's use of a chartered plane to complete filming on Season 33 may have changed the game for the better

Variety

The CBS reality show completed three episodes when the pandemic shutdown happened in March 2020. After a year and a half delay, The Amazing Race finished filming this fall with a chartered 757 jet to avoid crowded airports, with an abbreviated course that took the show through Mediterranean countries, where infection rates were low. The contestants also interacted with locals who had been tested and vaccinated. “It actually opened up a whole new world for us of how to do this in a very different way, but still have the same feel and energy,” Amazing Race co-creator and co-showrunner Elise Doganieri tells Variety. “It created a close race every single time that plane landed in the next city… I think you’re going really like the way the show plays out with this plane. It might be the wave of the future, but I don’t know if it’ll be affordable for a global trip.” Fellow co-creator and co-showrunner Bertram van Munster adds: “I picked a route that was mostly in remote areas or small cities. We looked very carefully so we could do two or three shows in a country, which we normally don’t do. These were all handpicked areas where they had the least amount of COVID, where we had freedom to go into a lot of areas where there’s nobody there.” The show, which left off in Glasgow, Scotland, instead returns via Zurich, and then Lugano, both in Switzerland, then the French island of Corsica, followed by Thessaloniki in Greece and then Lisbon, Portugal, before heading back to Los Angeles."