‘The Amazing Race Canada 3’ premiere review: A surprising elimination hopefully sets the town
Premiere episodes of “The Amazing Race” or “The Amazing Race Canada” are never the best. Basically, what you are forced to confront on the show are having to edit together a ton of footage involving 11 or 12 teams (in this case the latter), and present it in a very entertaining package. This is a lot of effort to pull off, which is why we like the premiere when it runs for a good 90 minutes at least.
So with the runtime of just an hour in mind, we really don’t feel like there was that much in the way of a lengthy leg on Wednesday night’s season 3 premiere. Granted we did get two pretty good and very location-specific Roadblocks, but it blew by rather quickly and could done in just a few hours if you knew what you were doing.
We’ll say first and foremost who has spent several years of their lives in Toronto, it is rather fun to see locations such as St. Lawrence Market and Ontario Place featured on the show. We’d been to more locations in this episode than pretty much on another other episode of the entire franchise. The TSN challenge was a fun one not just for cross-promotion, but to remind people how hard it is to actually be a news anchor. We have some experience in this, but they gave them some rather hard names to pronounce from a teleprompter!
The other major challenge tonight was a water-themed course at Ontario Place, which was exhilarating to watch … even if really did not provide much in the way of opportunities for teams to switch positions. None of the tasks were really that hard, and it was more just about overcoming fear.
Now, let’s talk teams. Gino & Jesse were completely dominant on the way to a first-place finish, and we were very impressed by Nic & Sabrina recovering after struggling at first to get out of Quebec City on their way to Toronto. As for some other notable teams, Hamilton (the first transgender contestant on “The Amazing Race Canada”) & Michaelia came in fourth, Simi & Ope came in fifth despite Ope not even knowing how to swim, and father-daughter Neil & Kristen stayed alive despite Neil’s confidence at being on-camera going completely up in flames.
The big surprise of the premiere was dating couple Max & Elias finishing in last place, given that they are young, fit, and look on paper like they would dominate on this show. What happened? The TSN challenge absolutely killed them, and while it stinks for them, it is great for the show to lose a team early on that typically makes it far. It proves that there are so many different layers to this show, and that despite a template of more than ten years of different versions of the show, you can still be surprised.
Hopefully this same exact level of unpredictability runs through the rest of the entire season like some sort of electric current, since at the moment it feels almost entirely too obvious that Gino & Jesse are going to win. They’re like the Olympians from last season … but wait, they didn’t win last year. Just a ton of legs. Maybe there is still some hope for a great season still. This was at least a pretty strong start. Premiere Grade: B+.
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