CBS The contestants of season 33 of 'The Amazing Race.'
The 33rd season of “The Amazing Race” premieres on Wednesday, January 5, 2022, at 8 p.m. Eastern time on CBS and Paramount Plus.
The season will kick off with a two-hour episode before returning to its regular Wednesday night time slot of 9 p.m. — 10 p.m. Eastern time on January 12. New episodes will air every Wednesday night.
Although the full schedule for season 33 has not yet been released, we do know that the eliminations schedule will be a bit different this season due to COVID-19 disruptions to production.
Filming for season 33 began in 2020, but production halted early due to COVID-19. By that point, two out of eleven teams had already been eliminated. When production resumed in 2021, two of the remaining nine teams were no longer able to participate. How did the show work around the missing teams?
“I don’t want to give too much away, but we did figure out how to do it without having more non-eliminations,” executive producer Elise Donanieri said during a press event (via Gold Derby). “We figured out how to extend a leg, things like that. We were very creative. So you will still have the same energy.”
When Will the ‘Amazing Race’ Finale Be?
Although a finale date for “Amazing Race 33” has not yet been announced, races are normally split into twelve legs, with each episode devoted to one leg. Legs end at pit stops and sometimes with eliminations, although not always. Sometimes the last team to arrive at a pit stop is eliminated and other times they just receive a penalty in the next leg of the race.
There are typically about twelve episodes per season, but that could change a bit in season 33, especially with the two teams that had to drop out of the race. The finale will likely occur sometime in April 2022.
What We Know About Season 33 So Far
Season 33 of “The Amazing Race” starts in a pre-pandemic world with the contestants racing to London from their own homes. Their next and last stop before production halted was Glasgow, Scotland. Variety reports that the show is referring to the production delay as “the longest pitstop in ‘Amazing Race’ history.”
When production resumed, contestants traveled to Zurich, Switzerland, Corsica, France, Thessaloniki, Greece, Lisbon, Portugal, and finally Los Angeles, California. The show’s executive producers Bertram van Munster and Elise Doganieri talked to Variety about how they managed to safely resume production of a show that involves world travel.
“I picked a route that was mostly in remote areas or small cities,” van Munster told the outlet. “We looked very carefully so we could do two or three shows in a country, which we normally don’t do. These were all handpicked areas where they had the least amount of COVID, where we had freedom to go into a lot of areas where there’s nobody there.”
Contestants also no longer used public transportation when production resumed. Instead, they got around using a chartered 757 jet. Any locals they interacted with had all been tested and vaccinated. Executive producer Doganieri told Variety that the safety protocols don’t detract from the show’s entertainment value.
“It actually opened up a whole new world for us of how to do this in a very different way, but still have the same feel and energy,” she said.
READ NEXT: Meet the 2022 Contestants From ‘The Amazing Race’