Recaps

RuPaul’s Drag Race season 13 promised to kick off a “Brand Ru Year.” Instead it delivered a joyless, boring Groundhog Day of an episode.

What the The Amazing Race 32’s finale lacked in intrigue or actual racing, it made up for by just being an overall joyful delight. That was true of this entire season, too: imperfect but enjoyable.

During Amazing Race’s first city sprint—which involved racing around Manila and completing tasks, kind of like every other leg of The Amazing Race, just without those tasks being labeled as Detours or Roadblocks—the alliance struck again.

When a company’s inanimate mascot gets more screen time and character development than the eliminated team on The Amazing Race, something may be broken. A recap and analysis of Amazing Race 32, episode 10, “Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty.”

The alliance started to crumble internally during The Amazing Race’s mega leg in India, which offered twice the challenges, twice the Yields, and even the return of Phil Keoghan introducing a Detour with “This” or “That.”

Amazing Race 32’s five-team alliance was back in full force this week, basically neutralizing an entire challenge. It may not be affecting the outcome, but it is affecting the show.

The second half of last week’s episode worked very well as an episode on its own, and had strong challenges, from whisking to identifying. But it was self-driving that led to the biggest surprises. A recap of Amazing Race season 32 episode 5, “You Don’t Strike Me as a Renaissance Man.”

The Amazing Race was scheduled to air back-to-back episodes tonight, but instead an episode of SWAT aired instead of the second. In the first, a Double Switchback brought back challenges from Amazing Race 20.

Teams helping each other led to an elimination of The Amazing Race 32 last week. And it looked like we might be in for a repeat of that again this week—with the only remaining Black team being targeted by a white alliance.

The Yield hasn’t made an appearance on The Amazing Race since the all-stars season in 2007. It’s back! But where are the Detours? And where’s the actual racing?

A recap of The Amazing Race 32’s premiere, “One Million Miles,” in which 11 really charming teams visited Trinidad and Tobago, and were pulled over the non-finish line mat by goats.

The Masked Singer season 4’s premiere had strong performances and fun costumes. And it also had a fake audience that acted as if it’s okay to be unmasked and physically close to other people right now.

Richard Hatch, Kelly Wiglesworth, Sue Hawk, and Rudy Boesch have survived to the end of Survivor: Borneo, and their incredible final moves in this new game would become the second-most-watched TV show of the 2000s.

Love Island season 2 is in Las Vegas instead of Fiji, but it’s the same show that it was last season, from the hot dumb cast to the narrator’s commentary. I’m not sure that’s what I want from TV right now, though.

The reward challenge for Survivor Borneo episode 12 turned out to be pivotal for the show’s crew and host Jeff Probst, who told the story of what happened behind the scenes when the cast threatened to not compete in the reward challenge.