Stunt casting on TV falls between two poles: on the one hand we have Lee Iacocca or Frank Zappa on Miami Vice, staring nervously at the camera before managing to grunt, "Okay, Sonny" and being mustered back into civilian life; on the other, we have David Lee Roth pulling up a chair at a Sopranos-sponsored all-night poker game, making small talk by wistfully recalling the good old days when his accountant let him deduct condoms. The decision to include screenwriter-director-actor Mike White (Year of the Dog, Chuck & Buck) and his 68-year-old pop, Mel, author of Stranger at the Gate: To be Gay and Christian in America, in the current season of CBS's The Amazing Race, the jewel in the crown of network reality-competition shows, definitely fell a lot closer to the Diamond Dave end of the chart. A pair of smart, genial wisecrackers who threw themselves into physical challenges and gave every sign of enjoying each other's company far too much to spoil the fun and the scenery with the kind of stress attacks and hissy fits that are an Amazing Race constant, Mel and Mike bestowed humor and class on the show, right up until their graceful exit last night, in the seventh episode of the season. They were the sixth of the eleven teams to depart, and while everyone was disappointed to see them go, at least they can boast of having made it squarely past the mid-point.
Their swan song came in Phuket, Thailand, a locale that the contestants were pretty good about not exploiting for any puns, at least not any that made it past the Standards and Practices Department. It was an unusually tight race throughout, with virtually all the contestants remaining neck and neck in their shared quest to be photographed with a handsome-looking and presumably well-sedated tiger--who was being looked after by, in a touch that might have been suggested by Charles Addams, a one-armed animal trainer--and receive a massage from an elephant. The big exceptions to this log jam were, sadly, our boys the Whites, who in a move whose logic never seemed entirely clear from my vantage point on the couch, chose instead to pile into a cab and have the driver give them a slow-speed tour of half of Thailand in search of a gorilla whose photograph Mike seemed to want to have autographed. By the time they conceded that they had chosen a flawed strategy and followed the well-beaten path to the zoo, they had fallen far behind their rivals.
Meanwhile, Mark and Michael, the short stuntmen brothers whose continuing presence on the course has been the cause of consternation and despair across our great land, rocketed ahead to the final challenge, requiring one brother to chauffeur the other to the final pit stop in a rickshaw. However, what would have been the brothers' first-ever first-place finish was tainted, when they arrived at the finish line only to be informed by the host with the most, Phil Keoghan, that they had incurred two time penalties for such offenses as having tampered with one of the challenges in a fit of douchebaggery. Phil restrained himself from inflicting an additional time penalty on them as punishment for the hilarious funny-Asian-person voice Michael chose to employ while pulling the rickshaw, but no one would have faulted him for it if he'd ordered a couple of the biggest grips on the crew to pound the brothers into a jelly-like substance and throw them off the closest pier. When all was said and done, the brothers were checked in as third-place finishers, and Mel and Mike were last to arrive. Phil was clearly overcome with emotion at seeing them go, but bravely managed to get enough of a grip on himself to give them and the world the terrible news. It was probably the closest Phil has come to bursting into tears on-camera since the show landed in New Zealand and his own father showed up to stand by his side and volunteered his services as a dispenser of hugs to any especially comely women contestants who felt in need of one. Mike White sang them out with the tender valedictory, “We’ve been father and son my whole life, but I don’t think we’ve ever really been teammates and being a teammate brings a whole different kind of camaraderie than you get in normal life. That was a great gift that the race gave us.”
Related: Mike White's Amazing Race
