Will The Amazing Race be renewed for season 31 at CBS? The bigger ratings picture

Is The Amazing Race renewed for season 31 at CBS? At the time of this writing, nothing is official as of yet — and rest assured, we really wish that something was.

Based on the current numbers, we have a hard time imagining how anyone at the network could look at them and think that season 30 was anything other than an unparalleled success. The show averaged a 1.2 rating in the 18-49 demographic and over 5.7 million viewers throughout the season, and that’s with the Olympics competition in mind — along with the aggressive programming schedule that has forced a number of two-hour episodes in a limited amount of time.

Let’s put this in perspective — season 29 of The Amazing Race averaged a 0.8 rating and just over 4 million viewers a week. That’s a HUGE improvement this season. It goes to show what a decent timeslot for this show can do! It’s the perfect fill-in between the start of the new year and the beginning of a new season of Survivor and it’s perfectly on-brand at the same time. There’s zero reason for CBS to want to change this since it’s ratings consistency.

Granted, if you hate Big Brother / Survivor cast members mixed into the show, be prepared to have to deal with more of that. We know that there are some people heavily crediting Jessica & Cody’s inclusion with the better ratings — they’re far from the only factor (the timeslot makes a big difference), but we do think it helps to have relevant CBS personalities. It takes away one of the fundamental issues with The Amazing Race in that it’s pretty hard to get to know 22 racers individually over a small handful of episodes. This allows you to have someone CBS already knows.

When will we learn about a renewal?

Hopefully before May rolls around. We’ll be honest — last season we were super-nervous about a renewal. This time, we’re fairly confident. (With our luck, this will be the season CBS cancels it just because 30 is such a nice number to end things on.)

As soon as some more news is announced on the subject, we’ll have it for you here.

Do you think that The Amazing Race will be renewed for a season 31 at CBS, and when do you want to see it come on the air? Share now in the comments!

Meanwhile, you can also like CarterMatt on Facebook in the event you’re interested in some other news when it comes to The Amazing Race. (Photo: CBS.)