Following a full minute of stock footage of downtown Los Angeles, the camera cuts to Phil Keoghan’s bedroom, where he appears just as daring in front of a wall of family photos as he would hanging upside down from a helicopter above the Great Barrier Reef.
He greets this season’s eleven teams by playing their previously filmed intro videos and then asking them to wave to their webcams. He then warns them to not use the internet to look stuff up, even though they have full internet and phone access because they’re confined to their homes and also have to set up some of the challenges themselves.
Their first task is to retrieve their backpacks from the unfinished basements, attic crawl spaces, and other inconvenient parts of the house that they were previously instructed to leave them in. Once they’ve reunited with their backpacks, they need to send a private direct message to Phil to retrieve their first clue.
A Zoom tutorial requested by retired couple Ethel and Byron delays the other ten teams by thirty minutes, because no one is allowed to leave their laptops if Phil is talking to the group. Best friends and hand models Jella and Jessandra correctly assume that Phil is the only member of the original show’s production staff involved in this season.
After going on mute and retrieving their backpacks, the teams are instructed to point their laptops at their children while Phil reads the Road Block task, which only one team member may complete, out loud. Long-distance couple Brick and Lydia comment that they are at an advantage for all Road Blocks because their pandemic-induced – and, for all we know, potentially permanent – physical separation has boosted their virtual communication skills.
The Road Block requires one team member to get all the children in the house seated in front of their laptops or iPads and logged into their first class of the day. Phil immediately gives Brick and Lydia and newly dating, quarantining-together couple Stan and Henna a four-hour penalty for not having any children in their homes. Carl and Brenda, married parents of four, get through the Road Block quickly by promising to pay their kids ten dollars if they’ll sit still in front of their computers for the next hour. Michael and Bolton, Yale-educated lawyers with inconsistent British accents, can’t find any sources of entertainment around the house to motivate their twin boys and fall behind.
Unsurprisingly, Carl and Brenda are the first team to receive a DM from Phil with their Detour clue. They must either “Feed the Fam” or “Flee the House.” The former task requires teams to order a meal from a single restaurant that will 100% satisfy each person living in the house. The meal must have six courses, including dessert, and Phil will gauge each family member’s level of satisfaction by sending an anonymous survey to each of their devices.
In “Flee the House,” team members must use whatever materials are immediately available to them to rappel down the side of their homes or apartment buildings to the ground floor. Brenda and Carl select “Flee the House” and dive out the living room window of their one-story ranch. Phil sends them a link to a private Zoom call where he checks them into the first Pit Stop on the race. They will depart for the next leg from their front lawn twelve hours later.
Phil’s webcam narration takes us back to the Detour. Carlie and Karlie, cousins and professional kite surfers with an inexplicable fear of heights, decide to “Feed the Fam.” Per the rules of the Detour, they are locked into a single restaurant chain – in this case, Papa John’s – and discover that their youngest cousin Calibri is both lactose-intolerant and opposed to bread. While they convince him to eat a side of Buffalo wings for the sake of the competition, we watch Jessandra drop her laptop while trying to film Jella rappelling down the side of her house with a sheet.
Phil issues Ethel and Byron a four-hour penalty for calling their kids to ask them how to open their direct messages from Phil; because they had turned off the sound on their laptop rather than put themselves on mute, they have no idea that they’ve received a penalty and proceed rapidly through the Road Block and Detour tasks after speaking with their youngest daughter.
Despite confidence that their youth and lifelong privilege would earn them a spot on the next leg of the race, Brick and Lydia earn a thirty-minute penalty at the Zoom Pit Stop because Brick forgot they were racing and called Insomnia Cookies after Lydia had already put in their Applebee’s order.
Ethel and Byron, who were under the impression that they had checked in four hours earlier, called their daughter again for tech support after receiving Phil’s congratulatory DM.