It was a real heartbreaker this week on The Amazing Race when Charla and Mirna, who have been among my favorites in this year’s competition (well, maybe not Mirna, but I liked Charla), became the sixth team to be eliminated after falling behind during a Roadblock challenge. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then obviously you haven’t been watching the show, and if you haven’t been watching the show then my question to you is, “Why the hell not?”

As I’ve mentioned before, The Amazing Race is my favorite “reality” TV show, which I suppose is not a difficult distinction to achieve since I hate all other representatives of this genre with varying degrees of venom. I hate them because they all thrive on humiliation of one sort or another, and I don’t like seeing people humiliated. Regardless of whether they’re competing for a cash prize, a marriage engagement that won’t last through the “reunion special,” or just their fifteen minutes of exhibitionist fame, contestants on these shows are routinely tricked, belittled and placed in situations that will, the producers hope, either make them physically sick or cause them to break down psychologically. The absolute worst of the lot, in my opinion, is Fear Factor. It’s an outrageously vile program that revels in the discomfort of its guests by combining all of the above forms of humiliation with a snarky, sadistic host who mocks contestants as they gag on their servings of rancid hog rectum or pee their pants at the thought of falling from a great height. (My father loves FF, which means I see it far more often than I would prefer. God knows I’m still trying to figure out what it is that he likes about it…) Even the granddaddy of reality shows, Survivor, amounts to little more than a celebration of poor behavior as its contestants lie, cheat, steal and betray each other to victory. The point of reality-TV often seems to be finding out just how low people are willing to go to win something, and I personally find that attitude degrading and disgusting.

The Amazing Race is different in just about every way imaginable, beginning with the contestants themselves. Instead of the late-teens/early-twenties bimbo/himbo types that populate most other reality shows with their perfect bodies, model looks and total lack of brains and/or integrity, TAR offers a mix of contestants from across the age and body-type spectrum. There are vacuous jerks on TAR, yes, but there’s also nice middle-aged people and gay people and old people and, in the case of Charla, even little people — to borrow a phrase from Sesame Street, it includes all the people in your neighborhood. (To be fair, Survivor has a diverse mix as well, but I rarely find many likable people among its contestants.) The host of TAR is different, too — Phil Keoghan seems like a guy you might actually want to hang out with. He isn’t a smug, capriciously god-like presence like Survivor‘s Jeff Probst, and he’s not a sarcastic putz like the guy on Fear Factor. Phil travels the course of the Race with his contestants and he gets emotionally involved with them; there are times when he seems genuinely unhappy to see a particular team go.

The show itself is a combination travelogue and competition in which winning and losing depends less on the dirty tricks and head games common to most reality shows than on luck, timing and flat-out courage. I was initially drawn to TAR for the travel aspects — I love travelling myself and enjoy seeing the different locations the show uses as its backdrop — but I’ve become hooked on the excitement of the race itself with each subsequent season I’ve seen.

Here’s the set-up for those who aren’t familiar with TAR: eleven teams of two people each are literally racing each other around the world for a prize of one million dollars. Each episode of the show covers one leg of the race — from California to Uruguay, for example. At the beginning of each episode, teams are given instructions on where to go, usually consisting of something like “take a taxi cab to the airport and get yourself to Zurich.” Which flight the contestants take is entirely up to them, and it is in choosing the right flight that the game is often won or lost for a particular team. When the teams arrive at their destination, they look for Route Markers where they receive additional instructions on where to go and what to do. Occasionally these instructions will include a Detour — a choice between two challenges with unique pros and cons — or a Roadblock, a task that only one team member can perform. These challenges are usually based in some aspect of the local culture and, while they occasionally stray close to Fear Factor territory — the Roadblock in one recent episode required contestants to eat two pounds of caviar, which degraded during the process into something resembling black snot — they are never designed to deliberately humiliate the contestants. (All eating-related challenges involve actual food items, even if the food is strange or there’s just plain too much of it for comfortable consumption.) Each episode ends with teams arriving a Pit Stop, where they will rest for a while and eat some normal food before beginning the next leg of the race. The last team to reach a Pit Stop is eliminated from the race. Now doesn’t that sound like a great show? It does to me, but I understand that TAR consistently pulls lower ratings than its reality brethren, and I just don’t understand why. If you’re not watching, tune in next Tuesday night and give it a whirl. You just might be surprised.

Okay, commercial over. Back to this week’s episode.

Usually, I don’t care too much about the first few teams to get cut. These early losses simply don’t get enough screentime to make much of an impression before they’re gone — this year was an exception, as I really liked the father/daughter team Jim and Marsha, who were the third team to be eliminated — but by the time you get down to a half-dozen or so teams, you have a pretty good idea of who you like, who you don’t, who deserves to win and who probably will win.

The team that was cut this week, Charla and Mirna, never had much of a chance of taking the final prize because Charla is a dwarf. Considering that the final episode of this show always comes down to a footrace between the top two or three remaining teams, it simply wouldn’t have been possible for her to effectively compete against “regular” contestants. Regardless, she and her normal-sized cousin Mirna did remarkably well and made it much farther along than I originally thought they would, earning my respect and my affection. They definitely deserved to win, even if they had no chance of actually doing it.

Surprisingly, Charla was the half of the team that got them so far. While Mirna often crumbled under the pressure of the challenges and spent a lot of time whining, Charla, who looks so fragile and childlike, proved herself mentally and emotionally tough, determined to do her absolute best, and not go down without a fight. I hesitate to say this because I hate the cliche’d Hallmark card form of expression, but she was truly inspiring. Host Phil Keoghan thought so, too, as he teared up during their “final words” segment at the end of the episode. As Charla talked about how she’d just wanted to prove that she could do anything a normal-sized person can do, even if she has to work three times as hard to do, and Phil assured her that she had met her goal, I got a genuine lump in my throat. That doesn’t happen often when I watch television.

Now there are five teams remaining, only two of which I particularly like.

Kami and Karli, the blond airhead twins, are conniving little bitches that seem to think everyone in every foreign country speaks Spanish, because obviously if you don’t speak American then you must know Mexican, right? They use their looks as a weapon, and I’ve never had much respect for those who do that.

Brandon and Nicole, the “dating models,” are born-again Christians who can’t hold a conversation on any subject, it seems, without bringing their religion into it. I distrust anyone who so openly wears their religion on their sleeve, automatically assuming that there must be some hypocrisy there somewhere, and besides Brandon has god-awful hair (he reminds me of Anne’s poodle when he’s gone too long between grooming sessions).

Colin and Christie, meanwhile, remind me of the characters we always hated in ’80s movies like The Karate Kid: the good-looking children of privelege with great hair who arrogantly assume that they will win because they’re supposed to. These two have been very strong competitors so far, but I’m beginning to see signs that they’re both unraveling — Colin, in particular, has been very short and snappy in the last couple of episodes. It will be interesting to see if they can hold it together.

That leaves Linda and Karen, the “bowling moms,” to whom I’m frankly indifferent, and my personal choice for who should win, Chip and Kim. Why does this married couple from South Central LA deserve to win, in my estimation? Because they are decent people who haven’t spoken poorly of any other contestants, haven’t tried to pull any tricks to slow their competition (Colin and Christie, I’m thinking about you), and because they are enjoying themselves. Unlike many of the other teams, who are entirely focused on the prize and seem indifferent to their surroundings, this couple recognize the incredible opportunity TAR has given them to see the world. In each and every episode, Chip has remarked on how “amazing” it is for him, a boy from South Central, to be standing in some exotic, postcard location. Their enthusiasm for and appreciation of the rest of the world is extremely endearing. They’re currently ranked number one, but that could easily change in the course of a single episode. Still, they have a good chance, and I hope they win…