Chris Ramirez/PRNewsFoto — Planet Green Josh Kilmer-Purcell, left, and his partner, Brent Ridge, created a reality show about their lives as farmers in upstate New York. On Sunday, they were revealed to be the winners of a million dollars on a different reality show, “The Amazing Race.”
Remember in the theme song of the CBS sitcom “Green Acres” how Eva Gabor, as Lisa Douglas, bade goodbye to city life? That also seems to be the fate of a winner of a CBS reality series.
Josh Kilmer-Purcell, who, with his fiancé, Brent Ridge, finished first on the 21st season of “The Amazing Race” on Sunday night, will be leaving his job at the JWT New York advertising agency, he said on Monday. He will be joining Mr. Ridge in Sharon Springs, N.Y., where the couple own a farm that has been the subject of another reality series, “The Fabulous Beekman Boys,” and a book, “The Bucolic Plague.”
During the season, the couple were identified onscreen by CBS as “goat farmers.” (Each pair of contestants has a description superimposed onscreen when they appear.)
In the closing moments of the final episode, when Mr. Kilmer-Purcell and Mr. Ridge won the $1 million prize, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell told Mr. Ridge that “winning this race will bring us together for the next 50 years.”
Mr. Kilmer-Purcell has been living in the couple’s apartment in Manhattan while working as a creative director at JWT New York, part of the JWT division of WPP. He joined Mr. Ridge — who formerly worked at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia — on the farm on weekends.
“I’ve been talking to JWT for a while” about leaving, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell, 43, said in a phone interview, particularly as the couple’s business centered on the farm — selling products like soap, linens, stationery and cookbooks — “has been growing.”
If anything, competing in “The Amazing Race” may have delayed his decision to leave, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said, because if he had announced he was leaving while the show was still weeding out contestants, others might infer that the reason was the couple’s first-prize finish.
Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said he hoped to have his work at the agency wrapped up by the end of the year. “We want to make sure the transition is smooth,” he said. And “hopefully, when they need me on a project basis, I could still” return, he added.
Mr. Kilmer-Purcell and Mr. Ridge, 38, who joined him for the phone interview, said they were hopeful that the outcome of “The Amazing Race” could lead to a third season for “The Fabulous Beekman Boys.”
That reality series, about the couple’s life on the farm, ran for two seasons on the now-defunct Planet Green cable channel, which had been part of Discovery Communications. Reruns of the show, which ended in 2011, are now appearing on the Cooking Channel cable network, part of Scripps Networks Interactive.
If there is a third season, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said, he hoped it would be “a wedding season for us.” The couple have been together for 15 years.
The first out gay couple to win a reality series competition, Chip Arndt and Reichen Lehmkuhl, appeared on “The Amazing Race” during Season 4, in 2003. The couple broke up soon after, however.
When reminded of that during the interview, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell replied, laughing, “Reichen’s been reaching out to me all day.”
More seriously, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said he wanted to speak out in favor of reality TV.
“Reality television gets a lot of bad knocks,” he said, because of series like “The Real Housewives” shows and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” “I’m proud that I’ve been able to be part of two shows that have had a positive impact,” he added.
Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said he used vacation and personal time from JWT New York to film “The Amazing Race” during the summer with Mr. Ridge. The two, like all contestants on the show, were asked not to discuss the outcome with anyone until the finale was broadcast.
This reporter met the couple at an event in September during Advertising Week New York and, indeed, they remained mum about the outcome — not even hinting that they had won.
Mr. Ridge said he and Mr. Kilmer-Purcell had been reading reactions to their victory that are both positive and negative. Among the negative was Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly, who declared that the “wrong team” had won; he had been rooting for a team composed of two Chippendale dancers.
Mr. Ridge and Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said they believed their careers in advertising, branding and media helped their game on “The Amazing Race.”
“You have to be intuitive and strategic” to win the numerous competitions during the season, which pit the teams of contestants against each other, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell said. “We might not have had the muscle or youth on our side, but we were intuitive and strategic.”
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/goat-farmer-with-a-side-project-in-advertising-wins-amazing-race/?partner=rss&emc=rss