‘Amazing Race’s’ Phil Keoghan on casting secrets, season 35’s ‘experiment’ — and his stance on alliances

nypost.com:

The Amazing Race’s milestone 35th season kicks off on Wednesday, Sept. 27 — and will air 90-minute episodes instead of its customary hourlong installments.Host Phil Keoghan notes that “10:00 time slots are challenging,” so CBS Entertainment President Amy Reisenbach liked the idea of “a block of reality television” instead of trying to fill something in between the series and “Survivor.”“It’s an experiment, like with anything you the audience so far,” he tells The Post. “From our point of view, what’s exciting is that we can open the show up a little bit.

When you’ve got 13 teams, now we have 13 teams.”Keoghan, 56, has been behind the competition series since its 2001 debut. He hopes that the extra airtime will give audiences more context about the contestants and this year’s new location, Slovenia.“I write the scripts with with one of the producers, and I’m always fighting for context,” he says. “I was just in Iceland with my dad.

I took my mom and dad on a once-in-a-lifetime trip. And everywhere I went in Iceland, I was stopped by ‘Race’ fans and they all said the same thing to me. ‘We’re here in Iceland because we saw it on ‘Amazing Race,’ and when you showed us the photos and you told us about the fault between the two tectonic plates, the Atlantic plate and European plate.

And when you showed the team swimming, that’s why we’re here and we’re actually going to go down and do that swim.’ Nothing makes me happier than hearing that because I know they remembered the facts, they remembered the context, and then it motivated them to get on a plane and travel to that place.