The Amazing Race All-Stars (Season 11): In-Depth Team Rankings

Spoilers for the first eleven seasons of The Amazing Race can be expected in this blog post, but not for seasons after All-Stars.

I originally planned to do full write-ups for every team on All-Stars. It was a season that naturally stood out for these – the teams in it are more interesting to analyze because they’re the second appearances of teams that we already know, and evaluated them in light of their first runs is an interesting thought exercise.

The Amazing Race All-Stars (Season 11): Thoughts and Rankings

The eleventh season of The Amazing Race is a very significant season, and an easy landmark to note in the history of the show, for two main reasons. For one, it is the season that really marks the end of The Amazing Race’s first era – it’s the last time we see several Race elements, and makes no changes to the Race format for one last old-style season, right before Season 12 will shake up quite a few aspects of the show’s format. But that trait of Season 11, the fact that it’s the end of an era, is made even more clear by the biggest, most obvious distinction that the season has: It’s All-Stars.

The Amazing Race 5: Thoughts and Rankings

After the relatively poorly-received Season 4 concluded, The Amazing Race entered what would stand as the longest hiatus in the show’s history for a good 15 years, all the way up until we recently had to wait 14 months between Seasons 30 and 31. For a full eleven months, from August 2003 until July 2004, there was no Amazing Race, and the show was in definite danger of cancellation. People simply thought that the show had already exhausted its potential for interesting television, with Season 4 having been perceived to be too stale, and if some decisions had gone differently, it could have ended up being yet another short-lived TV experiment.