Is The Amazing Race 31 renewal a given based on season 30 ratings surge?
Wednesday night’s new episode of the CBS reality franchise ended up generating in total a 1.5 rating in the 18-49 demographic, up versus the previous week. Through three episodes this season The Amazing Race has been incredibly constant, and this mostly serves as a reminder of two different things.
1. Stunt casting works – We aren’t the biggest fan of bringing Big Brother contestants onto this show, mostly because it leads to having to hear a bunch of houseguests talk relentlessly on the live feeds about how they want to do other reality shows after the fact. (Given how many of these contestants often lack self-awareness, this is certainly frustrating at times to say the least.) Nonetheless, putting Jessica & Cody on this season was obviously a great way to get viewers on board the show from the get-go. Typically with Amazing Race seasons if you can get people watching starting with the premiere, they’ll keep watching for some time after the fact.
2. Good timeslots work – It never made sense how it felt for years like CBS was trying to kill this show, which is reasonably inexpensive compared to some of their scripted properties. Burying it on Friday night, a time when families couldn’t watch, made little sense. The same goes for sticking it on the air on Thursdays at 10:00 p.m. Eastern. We didn’t even love it airing Sundays after NFL football since the timeslot constantly changed. It really should have been taking the place of Survivor during the off-season for years; we know Hunted also fared decently in this timeslot last year. (We’re still shocked that CBS didn’t bring that show back.)
Basically, we’re anticipating that an Amazing Race 31 renewal will be coming by around March or April — and we expect that another Survivor / Big Brother team will be coming after the fact. If that keeps the show alive it’s hard to argue against it.