After I wrote about reality TV that doesn't suck a couple of weeks ago, The Poisoned Sponge correctly identified the subject of the next post. For this, he wins a 48 hour extension to his normal lifespan, which has been automatically credited.
The Amazing Race is a reality gameshow that truly, honestly, doesn't suck. Though it'd been running for 12 seasons when I discovered it late last year, I'd never seen it and only peripherally heard of it, because when it airs in the UK at all, it's buried in the schedules at early hours and on channels I don't pay much attention to. And if you've missed it too, you should get right on the task of watching this excellent show. (Oops! How did that link get in there?)
The premise is simple -- a race around the world for $1m -- but the exact formula is cleverly constructed to make for very compelling television.
First and foremost, the race is between a set of two-person teams, and each team has an existing relationship. This makes for a huge amount of diversity in the contestants -- divorcees, a parent and child, gay partners, work colleagues, best friends, grandparents... all competing against each other. Much of the draw of the series is about how these teams react under pressure, with some working closely and with no interpersonal tension, and others bickering and falling apart through the race. A surprising amount of the show's drama comes not from the artificial hurdles of the race itself but from human relationships becoming dysfunctional under pressure.
Not that the hurdles are bad. Teams encounter various staged challenges between race checkpoints, to be completed by one or both team members before they can receive the next clue. These challenges range from the time consuming, like rounding up sheep or rigging a sailboat, to the phobia-inducing, like hang-gliding or bungee jumping. Some of these challenges are breathtaking, others are funny, and others fill time, but they're not presented in a stagey enough way to detract from the human angle, and in those cases where the contestant is required to face his or her fears, they can really contribute to the narrative the show builds.
The teams follow clues between elimination points, and as well as the planes that take them from country to country and continent to continent, transportation is a mixture of self-drive vehicles provided by the producers, and public transport. It's important to emphasise how much freedom the teams have in many of the legs of the race -- they hop in random cabs, create their own travel itineraries, and often take considerably different routes to their destinations, each team with their own camera guy in constant tow. Though things like the challenges obviously need to be planned in advance, many sections of the show are not set up at all, and it's quite common for a team to make a navigational mistake and get themselves and their (mute) cameraman lost or into some unfortunate trouble. When I was a kid I loved shows like Treasure Hunt and Interceptor, but those were carefully staged, with everything happening to a plan which was not permitted to vary much, even if the contestants or Anneka Rice weren't privy to the details beforehand. Not so in The Amazing Race: teams have a degree of freedom which, while not total (teams may be told they can only fly on certain airlines, for instance) is unlike anything else on TV.
If you dislike fast-paced editing, you're going to have a problem with this show. The average shot length must be about 5 seconds. But (with the disclaimer that I like fast-paced editing) it's very deftly done and not gratuitous. The point of view switches between teams constantly, but somehow, it's still easy to get a feel for the personalties of the players. But as well as speed and tension, the editing is done with a great deal of wit and humour. Source footage which surely amounted to many tens of hours per episode is condensed into tight, satisfying narrative, and ironic cuts abound. I think it's probably the best edited show on television. Each episode must take an age.
There's a lot of Amazing Race out there (13 seasons of the original American version, and three seasons AXN produced for syndication across Asia which are just as good, and much more diverse in contestant nationalities) but I recommend you start at the very beginning (this is the very beginning). The first season of the US show mastered the form from the get-go: diverse locations and challenges, teams you end up loving, teams you end up hating, great strategic play and epic game-ending blunders, teams bonding and teams disintegrating, tension, pathos, schadenfreude, and an ending which could not have been more of a dramatic and satisfying twist had it been scripted.
For many years I lived with the misconception that all reality competition shows were completely unwatchable. Not a particularly crippling mistake to make, as these things go, but still a little embarrassing. The truth, I've come to discover, is a little more complex.
You see, where I had thought there was only one, there are actually two mostly distinct classes of reality gameshow.
The first type of reality gameshow is at least partially determined by public vote. This being the case, the progression of the show needs to closely follow the real time unfolding of the events in the contest. These shows usually go out live or aired with a short delay, though they also feature segments on tape that have been edited together before broadcast. The turnaround of the whole show, however, is necessarily rapid, so the videotaped footage is hastily assembled in an edit suite sometimes mere hours before the show is broadcast. Examples of these shows are Big Brother, I'm a Celebrity..., The X Factor, etc.
Reality shows of this class should never be watched on any grounds, up to and including winning one. They are typically hastily-produced exercises in profit-making involving premium rate phone lines and, at any rate, the public vote renders them simple popularity contests rather than competitions based on strategy, skill, or even play. They have as much merit as the viewing public has taste.
The second type of reality gameshow is filmed in its entirety months before broadcast (sometimes on videotape, sometimes on film), and the competition's outcome is dictated by the contestants and the standard of their play strategy rather than by pandering to public opinion. The extended turnaround between filming and broadcast affords the opportunity for the producers to spend much more time in the editing room, creating coherent narratives, through-lines, emotional beats and amusingly ironic edits from hundreds of hours of source footage in post-production, creating a 'heightened reality' which plays out much more dramatically. (All reality shows manipulate events through editing, of course; I'm just saying some shows do it well.)
Though you may assume the second class of reality show is an evolution of the first, the mother of the reality TV show boom -- Survivor -- is shot months in advance, skilfully and cleverly edited, and the outcome is decided entirely by the contestants. So the first and now most common reality show type is actually a regression from the original -- a way producers invented to get the same kind of buzz of a successful show like Survivor for a much lower budget, in a way that produces additional income, and with the publicity benefit of being able to plant ostensibly legitimate stories about the show in the media as the competition unfolds on TV screens in near-realtime.
I'll have to complete this train of thought in another entry, where I'll tell you about the best reality gameshow (it's not Survivor), and try to make you feel bad about not watching it.
When I'm Xmas shopping for others I confess that I usually can't resist treating myself to some nice gadget as well, to give me something to play with over the holidays.1 Last year it was an Xbox 360, the year before that it was a digital SLR camera. This year, I bought myself a Drobo.
Drobo is an external storage device that connects to a PC or Mac by USB or Firewire. Inside it, there are slots for up to 4 drives -- standard, commodity SATA drives that are really cheap these days, even in crazy sizes like 1TB. Inserting a drive into one of these slots is about as easy and quick a process as inserting a 3.5" disk (remember those?) into a floppy drive.
The Drobo does its thing with two to four of these drive slots filled, and appears to the machine it's plugged into as a single drive. It always ensures that data is stored redundantly across the drives, so that any single drive failure will result in no loss of data.
So far, so RAID, but it gets better. Unlike a RAID, Drobo will use free space intelligently across drives even if they differ in size. And unlike most RAIDs, every disk swap operation can be done on the fly. This means if I have a Drobo with two drives inside, and I start running out of space, I can buy another drive and just... slot it in. Without turning anything off. Without losing access to data. It's completely transparent, except the lights on the front will flash for a bit to indicate that it's reorganising my data across the third drive. And then, if I look at my computer, my external drive will magically have more space on it.
If all four slots are full and I still run out of space, I just pull a small drive out of the enclosure (again, while it's running, and regardless of what it's doing) and replace it with a larger one. Again, it'll do the blinky light rebuild thing, and I'll have free space again. The same procedure if a drive fails.
Andy Ihnatko, tech journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times, explains this as the Drobo using cartoon physics. I think it's a confirmation of Clarke's law that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. Check out the 4.5-minute demo video to see how impressive this thing is.
This is an incredibly practical and consumer-friendly device. It doesn't need drivers and there's almost no technical knowledge required to use one -- it's got to be the easiest and friendliest approach to ensuring data redundancy I've ever seen. They are expensive, but I think it's worth it for the peace of mind alone.
Cool though this device is, though, it's functionally just a big external hard drive. But I've been playing with something else to get the best possible use out of my newly acquired storage space.
Plex is a Mac OS X port of the popular and highly polished XBMC Media Center software originally developed to run on modded Xboxes (but which now also runs on PCs). At its root, it's just an interface for audio and video playing, but it runs rings around both Windows Media Center and Apple's Front Row, both in terms of features and presentation.
Out of the box, Plex supports the Apple remote that comes with all Macs, so after setting up a single movie directory, it's already a very practical remote-controlled media centre. But the feature set and level of polish distinguish it from its commercial competition.
Unlike Front Row, it throws any format you care to throw at it without hesitating -- .vob, .wmv, .mkv, even .flv, so no pain-in-the-arse transcoding is required. It'll play from a local drive, from optical media, or stream over SMB shares.
The interface is straightforward, easily navigable, and beautifully designed. It integrates with things like the IMDB and thetvdb.com to fetch metadata for films and TV shows and integrate beautiful poster and menu art into the interface with minimal user intervention.
It really is a lovely piece of software. And it's free. Non-Mac users can get the original XBMC software instead -- which shares the interface and most of the features -- from xbmc.org.
This is all really just prologue to saying that as a holiday project I've been ripping my DVD collection to the Drobo to fill out a Plex-based media centre. At the moment, the media centre is my computer, but at some point in the future I'd like to have a dedicated box attached to a TV that would do all of this. Unfortunately the old Mac Mini I have sitting around isn't suitable for this, as it's a G4, and Plex appears to support Intel only. I already have a softmodded Xbox which is pretty good for this, but it doesn't have the CPU power to decode HD content in realtime.
I can't think of better tools to build and back a media centre machine than Plex and Drobo and I recommend them both very highly.
1 That probably sounds like shameless consumerism, but I don't make a regular habit of it, rarely make frivolous purchases, and technology is pretty much my one and only indulgence. That's not to say that I don't feel guilty about spending money on things, as this illogically-defensive-in-retrospect footnote probably proves. You know, let's just pretend I didn't say anything.
Yes, I owe you some longer blog posts. No, this is not one of them, but I need to get it out of my head. I warn you that this entry contains aesthetically offensive imagery and is not for the design-sensitive.
Muni is the public transport agency for the city of San Francisco, one of the most visually appealing and photogenic cities on the planet.
Muni's logo, as branded on most city buses, trolley buses, and trains, and which you consequently see about every five minutes in the city, is this:
Aaagh, my eyes!
So, if you go to San Francisco, be warned: it's a city that covers random surfaces with the design equivalent of goatse.
Picture the scene: near the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I am walking along the road back to our lodge about 20 minutes after watching a beautiful sunset. Two girls in their twenties are walking the other way. It is — this is important — almost dark. As we're passing, one of the girls asks me a question.
Girl, in strong Southern accent: Did we miss the sunset?
Me: (speechless for several seconds) ...What?
Girl, with identical intonation: Did we miss the sunset?
Me: Err... yes, the sun set about fifteen, twenty minutes ago.
Girl, loudly: Darn!
Me: ...Sorry.
I don't know which is more disappointing: that I couldn't think of a spontaneously funny response (like “yes, but if you go west really quickly, you can probably still catch it”, which came to me ten minutes later in true Treppenwitz style), or that this person will probably breed.
In America, I:
- Upgraded to First Class on a Virgin America flight and, for probably the only time, was in the first group of people on and off the plane.
- Ate Japanese food in the Sierra Nevada.
- With the rest of the audience, played like a kid with several kilometers of paper in the Blue Man Group show at the Venetian.
- Got up at 3am to get a bus to get a plane to get a coach. Ugh.
- Flew on a DHC-6 Twin Otter over the Grand Canyon as the sun rose over it.
- Stayed in a huge black glass pyramid with a balcony outside the door that looked out onto the world's largest atrium.
- Picked up John Hodgman's new book, three days ahead of the publication date.
- Shook the hand of Penn Jillette.
- Ate antelope.
- Climbed Sentinel Dome and experienced one of the most awesome, panoramic views I've ever seen.
- Drank my first pumpkin milkshake, which is only available at one place I know about, and then only seasonally. With extreme irritation, I discovered that it was by far the nicest milkshake I have ever tasted.
- Flew back over the Atlantic at the time the British clocks were put back, saving 12.5% of the jet lag. Unplanned, but quite a good idea in retrospect.
Photos are going up at roughly the rate of one a day on Flickr, and further reflections on the holiday to follow here.
Next: ten reasons why you should fly Virgin America at absolutely any opportunity.
Don't know when I'll be back again.
Slim to no chance of blogging for the next couple of weeks... I'm off to the US for my annual fleeting opportunity to stop thinking about work.
On the itinerary this time:
- San Francisco
- Las Vegas
- the Grand Canyon
- road-tripping from Vegas back to the Bay Area
- Yosemite
- Napa
- and, best of all, a burger at Taylor's Refresher
And who knows what else. I'm likely to post photos to Flickr while I'm there, but as I said, blogging will be thin on the ground (bah, and I was just getting the hang of it again).
Decisions