‘The Amazing Race 28’: Premiere date Tyler Oakley, Zach King, internet-star season

Tonight marks the end of “The Amazing Race” season 27, but as many diehard fans of this show know, there is another batch of episodes coming in the near year! This one may rival the blind-date experiment season when it comes to being extremely controversial.

Let’s explain first and foremost the reasoning behind this whole “internet star” season of the show: It’s for attention more so than anything else. This show needs more ratings in the 18-49 demographic, and if CBS thinks that this will get more people watching the show, we certainly understand why they’d want to do this. We’re not really sure that it speaks much to Middle America, however, which is probably what could make this a little bit polarizing when the dust settles.

Our personal feeling is that while this is not our favorite twist in show history, we don’t mind it in the event that it does keep the show around a while, and it’s always possible that these contestants could be entertaining! Most of them have internet fame for a reason. We just hope that there are no gimmicks thrown in there like the whole thing with the selfies in season 26 or some other gratuitous shout-outs to social-media accounts or whatever. Just put them in small graphics or whatever if you want to promote them that way.

You can see the full list of people appearing on this season over here. Tyler Oakley (famed YouTube star) is the only person we were actually familiar with at the time of the announcement, but we’ve come to enjoy some of the little editing illusions that Zach King has created over on his Vine. One other thing that gives us hope here is that while this season does have a clear gimmick, it’s not like the people participating are all of the same relationship-type. There’s still some diversity within the group.

We will be back after the season 27 finale with a full review, so stay tuned! Also, you can sign up over here to get some more TV scoop on all we cover, sent right to you via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: CBS.)