‘Amazing Race’ Season 33 Update: Phil Keoghan Shares Plans To Resume Filming

It will soon be a year since production was suspended on “The Amazing Race” due to the coronavirus pandemic, and while it may still be a while before things can resume, host Phil Keoghan is confident that it can still happen with safety measures in place.

In a new interview with Deadline, Keoghan, who was promoting the return of his other CBS competition series “Tough As Nails,” revealed that like fans of the show eager for the show to return (Season 32 finished airing in December after being shelved for almost two years), he also wants to get back, but because the pandemic is still a threat, there isn’t a way to produce the show in a safe enough manner.”

“We are absolutely chomping at the bit to get back out and shoot ‘Amazing Race.’ Keen to get the team back together,” he said. “We have to make sure the world is safe; as on ‘Tough As Nails,’ safety is paramount, it’s number one. We got to get people out and make a TV show but we want to get them home safely as well.”

The show had shut down production on the 33rd season in February 2020, prior to COVID-19 officially being declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

Keoghan’s comments echo ones he made on social media earlier in January after a fan questioned if the show was done.

They also come after CBS Entertainment president Kelly Kahl said last spring that things were going to be more complicated for both “Amazing Race” and “Survivor” because they filmed internationally, and that fans should be reassured that even with a wait, they wouldn’t go back into production until it was safe.

“If we get back into production [on ‘The Amazing Race’], you can trust that we have plotted out all of the safe and smart ways of doing it,” he said at the time. “Some countries are more affected than others and these producers are some of the best in the business and they will plot out a race that sticks to countries that are safe.”

Of course, with cases around the world reaching over 100 million, a return to filming internationally may not be so easy, especially with new, more contagious strains of the virus circulating around the globe. Countries that been visited by the show most often have also had some higher incident rates over the past seven days according to the CDC tracking system. Countries that have been visited multiple times, such as Brazil, France and The Netherlands, have all seen incident rates of over 100-200 cases per 100,000 residents.

However, filming solely within the United States for a season (which the show did during a family edition for 2008), is also risky, with the country still producing some of the highest numbers of positive cases and having a higher incident rate, with the CDC reporting more than a million new cases in the last 7 days and an incident rate of 353.2/100,000 residents.

In the past seven days, the country has seen the total number of cases grow to 25 million total since the start of the pandemic, and the highest average daily case rates per 100,000 residents in New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona.