Scenes from a Marriage - The Amazing Race Asia Edition

Not too many people I know liked the first edition of The Amazing Race Asia, but I enjoyed it a lot. Granted, the race was poorly designed and host Allan Wu was utterly Wu-botic (Wu 2.0? A marked impwuvment.) But the racers cast were generally enjoyable to watch: the awesomely competent though infelicitously named Zabrina and Joejer; the incredulously neurasthenic-prone and ill-prepared Howard and Sahran; and best of all, the snarky/sassy delight that was Laura and Andy. And there was that fantastic Episode 5 (aka "Child on a Swing"), a biblical parable unto itself that saw the karmic downfall of the unpleasant Prashant and Sahil.

The second edition of the race has more cosmetic polish than the first, yet it is a vastly less entertaining experience for me. Some of the blame falls on the quite-reviled Marc and Rovilson, who fuse the dominance of the 95-96 Bulls with the, uh, "charm" of Urkel. But annoying as they are, they only make me jam the mute button. On the other hand, Terri and Henry make me reach for the power switch, then reflect in unsettled meditation on how that relationship could not but inflict deep pain on each other, their respective families, friends, neighbors, and the entire AXN audience.

The online commentators I have read mostly pin the blame on the indisputably shrewish Terri, the collateral fault on Henry for not having enough balls to stand up to her. There is certainly a complex history worthy of Ingmar Bergman that precedes their relationship as featured on TV, which AXN has wisely not delved into. Second-guessing that milieu is perhaps fair sport for the viewer, yet it is a tad unfair to pretend omniscience over that marriage based on the 30 minutes or so we have witnessed of their married life. I'd prefer to speculate what must have gone through the minds of the AXN producers, having been gifted in the rushes with these scenes from an unmistakeably dysfunctional relationship prodded by the wholly impulsive , unselfconscious Terri.

I have encountered so many people who are exactly like Terri, so much so that watching her is a familiar experience. Because of this, I cannot subscribe to the view that her behavior is so atypical as to merit the sort of condemnation reserved for the most odious types in society. Yet it is one thing to see the dynamic played out in live action among familiars, and another to witness it among strangers on television for the consumption of global public discussion. In the particular case of Terri and Henry, it really is discomfitting.

Don't these people realize that they are on TV?! I remember reading Linda Ellerbee's mid-80s book And So It Goes, where she observed that Americans even then were so TV-savvy, a news crew could pull any face from a crowd watching a neighborhood fire, and that person could be expected to give a pitch-perfect eyewitness account ripe for airing on the 6'o clock news. That could account for why American reality show contestants, no matter how vile, are generally able to play for the cameras in telegenic fashion. Your average Filipino has not graduated to that level of inauthenticity, so I doubt that the Terri we see is a deliberately exaggerated version of herself. Which makes the viewing experience even more cringing.

I've had these dreams where I was a contestant on The Amazing Race or on Survivor (placing 5th, btw), and even from that unreliable and hazy standpoint, I know I wouldn't want to join a reality game show even for a million dollars. Despite some knowledge of who they were, apart and together, Terri and Henry deliberately surrendered away their privacy to the Race producers for the viewing pleasure of a global audience. So I can't really feel sorry for them if they regret doing so. The end result allows us to rare peek into a dysfunctional relationship that is all too real, one that would have been rejected as commercially unviable had it been scripted. But before we kudos and all the Amazing Race Asia producers for this honest slice-of-life, it bears reminder that this still is a rather silly though entertaining game show.