Desperate Housewives, Blood Thirsty Weavers

The prolonged isolation of the pandemic has made us all do things we usually wouldn’t do. Some people have impulse purchased Amazon’s entire inventory. Some people unsuccessfully tried cutting their own hair. I rewatched the family edition of The Amazing Race.

Now, some background. The Amazing Race is a bit of an oddity. It’s been airing continuously, albeit semi-sporadically, for 19 years and 32 seasons. Yet from the start it’s always been on the verge of cancellation and it’s been nowhere near as big CBS’s other primetime reality shows: the ratings juggernaut Survivor and the low-cost summer mainstay Big Brother. But it’s also been a critical darling and it continues to have a strong cult following. It’s a bit of an underdog, but a very beloved underdog. In the show’s history, however, there’s been one famous exception to all this adulation: the family edition, which was the show’s eighth season.

In a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to shake things up, the producers of the show changed the format dramatically. For those unfamiliar with the general concept of the show, it usually features 11–12 teams of two people with an existing relationship who travel around the world. For this edition, there were 10 teams of four blood/marriage-related people. Many of the families included children, which meant that for insurance purposes the show couldn’t travel outside of North America. Instead, the family edition’s route acts as a sort of love letter to the United States, traveling to more remote places in America the show likely otherwise would never have visited, like Amish country, the deep South, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone, with detours to Panama, Costa Rica, and Canada. Rewatching it, it’s charming to see the show treat North America’s scenic wonders with such reverence, but at the time, everybody fucking hated it. I’ll spare you a summary of the criticism, because nobody said it better than contestant Marion Paolo in episode 8: “What are we going to Phoenix, Arizona for? I wanna go to New Zealand.” While this season may have its unique appeal now, you can see how the fans of an international travel show constantly about to be cancelled would be upset if this was the show’s swan song.

Besides the lack of international travel, the family edition was also heavily criticized for the massive amount of intra-family bickering (largely taking place during the long drives between destinations, resulting in a lot of uncomfortable close-ups of people sitting in the backseat of an SUV). But something even weirder happened during this season: there was also a huge amount of inter-family bickering, and 95% of it was between the Weaver family and everyone else.

When I watched the season for the first time when I was 12, the Weaver family was my favorite. At first, it’s hard not to root for them. The team consists of widow Linda Weaver, whose husband died while clearing debris after a crash at the Daytona speedway, and her three kids, Rebecca, Rachel, and Rolly. Throughout the race, they have to keep confronting the trauma of losing their father as they crash an Amish buggy, visit the Talladega speedway, and complete a go karting task. You might think this would make them incredibly sympathetic to their fellow teams and the audience alike, and you would also be very wrong. They were hated by other fans and mocked in reviews, and, crucially, they made enemies out of nearly all the other teams fairly quickly.

Before we continue, though, I want to make a disclaimer: before anything else, this is a TV show that aired 15 years ago and these are normal, regular, everyday people. I’m not here to judge the Weavers outside of the race. I’m sure they’re all good people. But this is reality TV, everyone gets presented a certain way, and I’m certainly going to judge that. Got that? Okay, good, because I’m inevitably going to sound a little mean…starting with the next sentence.

If you have 17 minutes and 14 seconds to spare, I highly encourage you to watch “Everyone Hates the Weaver Family”, a masterful supercut of the Weavers’ villainous edit on the race. From the get go they have an antagonistic streak, calling the Godlewski family (a team of four adult sisters) the Desperate Housewives. However, for the first two episodes they largely stay out of the other team’s sights and do well, coming in third place on the first leg despite the aforementioned buggy crash and winning the second leg. However, when the teams head to an airport for the first time to travel to South Carolina, things start to unravel quickly. The Weavers stop any staff they see at the airport to see if there are any early flights, which rouses the other teams’ suspicions. Unfortunately, in a move that makes some sense strategically but not socially, the Weavers give the cold shoulder to anyone who asks them what they know. As you can imagine, this basically removes any remaining goodwill they may have had. From here on out, everyone’s mission is to beat the Weavers. To make matters worse, once they reach South Carolina, the Weavers get hit badly by Killer Fatigue. They break down hard during a long bus trip in the middle of the night, resulting in one of the more bizarre scenes in Amazing Race history when the Weavers start crying and dancing in a Waffle House parking lot.

For the rest of the race, the Weavers perform consistently in the middle of the pack, despite getting yielded (forced to stop racing for 30 minutes) twice, first by the Paolo family and later by the Linzes. After getting yielded a second time, the Weavers finish last but are not eliminated. On the verge of quitting, host Phil Kehogan gives them a pep talk. However, they push on. In the next leg, they taunt the Linzes for yielding them, then taunt the Godlewskis for allegedly being awful people with bad plastic surgery, then taunt the state of Utah for being ugly and filled with weird Mormons (more on that later!). In the finale, Rolly Weaver nearly gets into a pushing match with a Linz brother at the airport and the family almost quits again after struggling with a needle-in-a-haystack task in Montreal. But they push through yet again and make it to the finish line where they ultimately come in the third place, much to the relief of…everyone else. The villains get their comeuppance.

However, not only are the Weavers the family edition’s villains, but they’re also the one of the most unique villains in reality TV history. Let’s go back for a minute. I didn’t mention that the Weavers are very, very Christian, and they’re not afraid to proselytize! One thing that I noticed now that I didn’t before is that the Weavers ask nearly every cab driver they meet if they are a Christian like them, which is awkward enough on its own. But besides that, because of their intense religiosity the Weavers believe they are the most moral team on the race. This means that they deserve to win and everyone else deserves to lose since they come from a clan of amoral degenerates. Over time, their fervor is presented on the show as being increasingly hypocritical. This happens first as the Weavers’ insults and harsh nicknames for the other families ramp up (a side note: there’s a very bizarre class dynamic that plays out with this in which the Weavers get called white trash by the other teams while they insult Tony Paolo for being a garbage collector. There are layers here!) and as they get to Utah, begin insulting God’s creations and God’s chosen people, who are arguably less weird than them! At first, they’re portrayed as a grieving family, but by the end they’re religious hypocrites of the highest order.

This makes it difficult to square them with other reality TV villains. I have a working theory that nearly every reality TV villain can be placed somewhere in a matrix measuring their villainy along two axes: bickering/agreeableness and deviousness/incompetence:

Let’s run through a couple of examples. Perhaps the most famous example of a highly devious, highly argumentative villain is Survivor’s Russell Hantz, who burned people’s clothes and found Hidden Immunity Idols on his way to the top, but whose frequent betrayals and unlikability ensured he would never win. Contrast that with other beloved Survivor villain Parvati Shallow, who famously manipulated others with aggressive flirting, which made her slightly less devious but a lot more liked than Russell. You can easily find several examples of incompetent teams who argued a lot on The Amazing Race, like Nick & Vicki from The Amazing Race 17 who constantly misread clues and fought with each other constantly, but it’s much rarer to find someone who is so incompetent as to be villainous but who never fights with anyone. I think the strongest example of this is American Idol’s Sanjaya Malakar, who was berated week after week by judges and mentors for being a weaker singer than his peers, but who always maintained a positive attitude and a big smile.

The Weavers don’t fit neatly into any of these dynamics. They’re not really strategically devious, but they’re also not incompetent; remember, they did very well in the beginning of the season and remarkably, the 14-year-old Rolly did seven roadblocks (tasks only one person can perform). They fought a lot with the other teams, but they never fought amongst themselves. And unlike all the other aforementioned villains, their religion is constantly played up, and it’s clear that the Weavers believe their Christianity gives them a leg up on the other teams. They probably could fit right in the middle of the diagram above, but their position is so unique I find that hard to do.

However, while the Weavers represent a rare class of reality TV villain, they’re not alone. Their closest analogue comes from an unlikely source: the first season (sorry, cycle) of America’s Next Top Model. The first cycle of ANTM is fascinating, because it’s the only reality show that I can think of where the primary sociological conflict isn’t the contestants’ race or class or gender: it’s their religion. And no one highlights that divide better than the show’s villain, Robin. The contestants are divided into two factions: Robin and Shannon, who are staunch Christians, and Elyse and Adrianne, who are staunch atheists. (There’s another staunch Christian, Kesse, but she’s the only one that everyone likes). This tension famously comes to a head when Robin shows Elyse a bible verse that says “The fool says in his heart there is no god”, which causes Elyse to deliver an all-time confessional tirade against all of her competitors. At first, Robin is depicted as being steadfast and consistent in her beliefs; however, in the cycle’s penultimate episode she is criticized for the judges for refusing to pose nude after jokingly showing her naked body to then-make up artist Jay Manuel during a challenge. She is later eliminated for her hypocrisy.

Like the Weavers, Robin would likely fit square in the middle of this chart. Her photos weren’t as consistently great as Elyse’s or Shannon’s, but she wasn’t awful either. She certainly fought with other contestants, mostly with Ebony over Ebony’s sexuality, but she also got along great with Shannon and Kesse. As such, the Weavers and Robin are a match made in heaven. They’re both convinced of their moral superiority because of their beliefs, they both are statistically average performers in their respective competitions, and they manage to piss a lot of people off along the way. Sure, other villains have used religion to their strategic advantage (e.g. swearing on bibles/dead grandmothers), but neither the Weavers nor Robin used religion in a strategic way. It was just who they were!

In fact, maybe it’s telling that there really haven’t been contestants like the Weavers or Robin that I can think of in 15 years. In the past, producers have more likely to play up people’s religious/political differences. For example, I remember that in Big Brother 10, Libra’s liberalism vs. Dan’s conservatism was played up in the introductions on the show’s first episode, even if it never came up any time after that. But these days, while people may still proudly represent their faith on reality TV, it’s far more unlikely that people will be open about their politics, and it seems that producers don’t want to stir the pot too much. CBS in particular has generated a lot of controversy for the racism that has plagued Big Brother and the sexual harassment that occurred on Survivor: Island of the Idols. This tension between corporate responsibility/PR and wanting conflict because, well, TV shows need conflict has arguably resulted in the creation of a new kind of villain: the bigot. If I can only think of two religious hypocrites, sadly I can think of a whole lot more bigots just from Survivor (Jeff Varner, Dan Spilo) and Big Brother (BB21 Jack, BB20 JC, BB15 Aaryn).

Maybe (hopefully) this archetype won’t last much longer either. In November, CBS announced that they would cast at least 50% people of color on their reality shows, but of course whether this actually happens or not remains to be seen. And personally, while you can’t stop reality TV from functioning as a microcosm of society, it’s still somehow more enjoyable to watch a sanctimonious Christian crash and burn after being hoisted on their own petard than it is to watch someone be racist. Regardless, it seems that the halcyon days of the Religious Hypocrite Reality TV Villain™ are over. In the meantime, though, as no one has ever said before or will ever say again, at least we’ll always have the family edition.