If you don’t know Rob and Amber Mariano, then you haven’t been watching reality television. Now veterans of of two Survivors, two Amazing Races, and their very own Fox Reality Channel show, Rob and Amber are easily the most well-known and infamous couple in the history of reality TV. Rob and Amber were eliminated in an upset on The Amazing Race: All-Stars last night, and were kind enough to stop by and talk to us at BuddyTV this morning.
BuddyTV: Was there any hesitation on your part in signing up for The Amazing Race: All-Stars?
Rob: Yeah, actually Amber and I went back and forth over the period of a couple of weeks trying to decide whether we wanted to do it. You know, coming so close last time and just the frustration that goes along with The Race, we definitely had some apprehension. But at the end of the day we thought that it was a pretty big honor to be chosen to be on The Race in the first place, let alone do the All-Stars. And to do the All-Stars twice with Survivor and The Amazing Race, we thought it was a pretty big honor, so we decided to sign on.
Once you started The Race and saw who the other teams were, who did you feel was going to be your toughest competition?
Amber: To tell you the truth, we don’t even look at the other teams as competition. I mean, it’s the type of show where The Race is your competition. The course is set up as your competition, not necessarily the other teams. So I mean, going into it we weren’t really intimidated by anybody.
That last leg had to be pretty frustrating for you guys. Did you know that you messed up the spelling on the sign until watching it on TV last night?
Rob: No, we didn’t and to tell you the truth, there’s still some confusion over what the rules actually said for us to do on that challenge. It was very, very frustrating watching it play out on TV last night. When we got to the end of the leg, we knew we were in last place and we knew that, you know, we were going to be eliminated but it didn’t really make it any easier.
Amber: And they made it look like it was a foot race to the finish line but it wasn’t.
Yeah, that’s what I figured. What were the rules on that task? Did it say it had to be spelled correctly?
Rob: It actually didn’t. That wasn’t specified but without going into it too much, I think if you look at some of the other teams and the way they spelled their words, there was some questions about the legibility of their writing, as well as some of the directions. At the end of the day, Amber and I went into this thing, we gave it our best shot and we’re not here to make excuses about it. We played as hard as we could, you know we were dominating The Race up until this point and you know, we had a bad leg. We really don’t have any excuse for that, we screwed up and unfortunately it cost us.
Was there anything over the course of the season that got edited out by CBS that you wish they had shown?
Rob: Well, I mean it’s a long production with a lot that happens in between each leg of the race. I mean there’s three, four, sometimes five days for each leg of the race, so a lot gets edited out. You know, funny moments and this and that. There were stops that we made on the race where they cut out the entire stop just because nothing dramatic happened.
Amber: If good television doesn’t come out of it and they have other parts that they can use, then they’re not always going to use every single thing that they have planned.
Rob: Overall I think we were pretty happy with the way we were edited and the way we were portrayed. It was true to us and how we are.
Amber: For sure.
Part 1 / Part 2
(Interviewed Conducted By Oscar Dahl)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
