Rob and Amber's success
hurts ‘Amazing Race’

When CBS cast “Big Brother 4” twit Alison and her boyfriend Donny for “The Amazing Race 5,” the Emmy award-winning series seemed to be selling out, using nepotism to draw viewers from one series to another. But Alison and Donny’s quick exit — they were eliminated during the second leg of the race —turned them into the joke many viewers hoped they’d be.

Two seasons later, “Survivor” veterans Rob Mariano and Amber Brkich joined “The Amazing Race 7,” after practically begging to participate. Those who’d lamented the Alison and Donny stunt casting hoped that Rob and Amber would follow their “Big Brother” counterpart and flop on their faces early on, letting the real teams run the rest of the race.

That didn’t happen. Now, Rob and Amber are now one of the final four teams. They’ve cruised in to first place during three out of seven legs, and in three others were in third or second place, raking in trips, behaving ruthlessly, and eviscerating other teams. Based upon their success so far, they may just take it all.

Perhaps even more than the dysfunctional relationships and confrontational tone of the sixth season, Rob and Amber’s presence, aggressive game play, and boundless luck has divided fans. Some love them, some hate them, but everyone agrees that they’ve influenced the show unlike any team before them.

Their success, though, has hurt the show’s rapidly tarnishing reputation.

Unfair advantage?
First, there’s the issue of fairness. With their appearance on “The Amazing Race,” both Rob and Amber have each had three separate opportunities to win $1 million on CBS reality shows.

Rob is fond of pretending that he won “Survivor All-Stars” (“we’ve already won a million,” he said once), but he’s actually lost that game twice. While he didn’t even make it to the jury during “Survivor Marquesas,” his alliance with Amber and strategy did help him to place second on “Survivor All-Stars,” and he earned a substantial $100,000 prize. Both he and Amber also won new vehicles. And CBS paid for their recent wedding and will air it as a two-hour special next month. Do they really deserve or need more?

Perhaps more egregiously, their celebrity has created an unfair advantage on “The Amazing Race 7.” Traveling in other countries, Rob and Amber stumble across magazines with their faces on the cover, and people frequently recognize them. Certainly, the cameras and production people with the teams attract attention for all of the teams, but more than once this season, Rob and Amber’s fame has helped them out, and that’s an advantage the other teams will never have.

‘The Robfather’
Most of their success, though, is due to their abilities. “Boston Rob” is at once ingenious and insufferable, cunningly evil and completely charming. His behavior and game play earned him the nickname “The Robfather” on “Survivor Marquesas,” and lost him “Survivor All-Stars.” But it landed him in second place during the All-Stars season, and has kept the couple near the top of “The Amazing Race” pack.

That’s because Rob’s a walking paradox. When he calls Amber “my girl,” he sounds both genuinely affectionate and obnoxiously sexist. Talking about working with locals, he said, “It’s tough organizin’ Indian labor,” and with that, he managed to be both endearing and offensive all at once. He says nearly everything with a cute grin, looking like a bear cub that will snuggle up against you just to get close enough for a good mauling.

And his approach to “The Amazing Race” takes advantage of all of those characteristics as he claws his way to the front of the pack. In the process, he’s quite possibly fundamentally altering the series, like the way that Richard Hatch’s first-season alliance affected every subsequent game. In six seasons, no one had ever run the race quite like Rob has.

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