It’s been only weeks since the last season of The Amazing Race finished up, and already I’m seeing commercials for the next installment, the 18th. Because it hasn’t been very long, I should remember the contestants pretty well, but no, not really: Since I know them only by their first names, except the ones I look up, they’re basically anonymous. Win or lose, they’re normally only as memorable as how thoughtless or obnoxious they appear, or in too many cases, what they already have some notoriety for.

As I’ve previously written, I’ve only seen about half of the seasons. Still, that’s plenty of time to get annoyed by the tendencies I’ve seen in the winners. Not only are they invariably younger-than-middle-age, as noted, but a number of them have been doctors, lawyers, models. Pillars of society and well compensated for it.

My point is: Beyond increasing the difficulty for some of these challenges, Race organizers should prohibit some of these fuckers from competing in the first place. (CBS employees are already prohibited, so they’re not unfamiliar with discounting people.) Nothing ruins the show for me more than some smug doctor white-smiling his or her way to another pit stop, picking up more prizes and vacations on the way to winning a million dollars.

Well, cut that million in half, for taxes. Then you’re splitting what’s left with your partner, so you’ve got roughly $250,000 there, if you win.

For some of these bastards running the Amazing Race, that’s less than a year’s salary, I’m sure. I say, if the prize is more than your salary, you should not be allowed to run.

Another of my suggestions is a little more esoteric: For some of these younger people, these full-time or part-time models/actors/actresses/cheerleaders, check their parents’ salaries. It’s like a reverse-guarantor situation: If your parents make 85 times the cost of your portion of the Race, you can’t go. Not fair. Genetics has been good enough to you. Let some possibly attractive independent coffee-shop owner and his/her partner go, and let them compete with a couple of teachers, and nine other pairs of middle- or working-class heroes, unless they are truly obnoxious anyway or hiding money in an offshore account.

Also: Some of these folks have already been to these countries they are visiting, some quite recently. Eliminate them from contention. Not fair. Organizers should check their passports. I have nothing against being worldly for being worldly’s sake, but when you have a chance to level the playing field by not allowing contestants who have been to whichever far-flung destination, or even have been able to speak the “foreign” language from birth, you have to go ahead and do that.

The bottom line is, in a competition like this one, that also has some humanitarian benefit by showing ethnocentric Americans what’s what, why not go all the way with it? Pick 11 pairs of people who have never left the United States. It’s television, so they’d have to be pretty, but I’m sure you could find 22 people a season, twice a year, who meet the criteria. I suppose anyone who has wanted to leave the country, and who could swing the expense, already has done so. So the combination of inexperience and enthusiasm might be tough to find, but tougher things have been accomplished in this world.

I don’t know. Maybe all but a few of these contestants have never been to the countries they visit. And I suppose that a certain amount of travel experience and savvy facilitates a more intellectually competitive running of the race. And I guess we’re beyond much of the airport drama that bogged down some of the earlier installments. But we’re at a point now where contestants have the ability to have watched, or to rewatch, earlier seasons as much as they’d like, to see sort of how it’s done and how to avoid some of the more obvious mistakes. The only real risk I see running is possibly appearing to exploit those to whom the entire rest of the world might seem weird or backwards or excessively scary or completely inferior in every way. Maybe I’m backwards for assuming they’d assume that particular assumption, but maybe not.

All I really know is that in the upcoming season of The Amazing Race, I’ll have the unfortunate opportunity to root against five or six teams I absolutely despised their first time around. So there’s that.