Survivor and The Amazing Race: The days of Rob and Amber

There aren’t many people who get to spend time on two of CBS’ big three reality shows, and, back in the day, Rob Mariano and the then-Amber Brkich did it.

It’s time to take a journey outside the realm of Survivor. Yes, this is still Surviving Tribal; no, you have not actually found yourself in some alternate universe. Don’t worry. We’re not going that far out of Survivor. In fact, we’re even staying on the same network!

CBS, for quite some time, has had three major reality competition shows. The oldest of the three, by a couple months, is Survivor. Then comes Big Brother, which is ironically enough the middle child in this metaphor. The “baby” of the family (by about a year) is The Amazing Race. All three of them are still on the air for now.

It’s time to take a journey back to when Survivor was in its heyday and The Amazing Race was, too. The year’s 2004.

Rob Mariano and Amber Brkich met on Survivor: All-Stars, which technically filmed the year before, but the world saw it unfold in the winter and spring of 2004. This culminated in Amber winning a million dollars, Rob taking the runner-up prize, and also a proposal of marriage. Now, this was perhaps the biggest moment Survivor had produced since Richard Hatch won the million in Borneo. CBS almost certainly knew that it was more than possible to continue this love story.

So why not put them on Big Brother? Since that’s a voting game, it would be easy for other players to target and break up Romber, which was, no joke, a term that The Amazing Race‘s other races used for them. Speaking of, The Amazing Race … now there was something. It was all on Rob and Amber to use strategy and their physical strengths. The other teams couldn’t kick them off.

Now, the other teams probably wanted to kick them off, but they couldn’t do that. In their first stint on The Amazing Race (season 7), Rob and Amber basically played the closest they could to a Survivor game, and this was mostly led by Rob.

There are a lot of instances of lying and a little money changing hands throughout the season, but here’s the most pivotal moment. It was leg 3. The Roadblock (to paraphrase Phil Keoghan, something that only one person is allowed to do) was to eat four pounds of various kinds of meat and intestines. Rob decided he was going to do the task.

He then decided to not finish the task, thus taking a four-hour penalty. In the normal scheme of things, this would have been it. The Amazing Race doesn’t play around with time. But Rob, being Rob, found a way to make a strategy out of it. He convinced other people to quit too, after he had quit, giving him and Amber the time they needed to survive, pun fully intended.

The funny thing? The Amazing Race‘s seventh season actually had the best ratings of the series to date. Why? Because it was Rob and Amber, pretty much at the height of their media exposure if not popularity, against Uchenna and Joyce, who were nicer.

So, if you need something classic Survivor-esque but don’t want to watch classic Survivor, which doesn’t make a lot of sense but hey, to each their own, The Amazing Race season 7 is probably your best entry point into TAR. There are over 30 seasons of that show as well, so between the two, you could have a lot of watching material.

Next: Retro Survivor rewatch: Borneo episode 1

After getting married, Rob and Amber also came back for the first All-Stars season of The Amazing Race, too, but they had a far less satisfying run that time (and, if you start with season 7, you might not enjoy it as much since there are teams from other seasons, too, naturally).