Just how attuned are television producers these days to chatter about their shows on Twitter? So much so that they watched in awe, half a world away, as two Twitter users saved a team on “The Amazing Race” from being kicked off the CBS show.
Sonja Flemming/CBSKaylani Paliotta, left, and Lisa Tilley narrowly escaped being eliminated from the show.
The 19th season of the race-around-the-world reality show had just started taping in June in Southern California when one of the contestants, Kaylani Paliotta, unknowingly left her passport at a gas station. The camera crew with Ms. Paliotta and her teammate, Lisa Tilley, noticed what had been left behind, but could not tell them. Instead, they sent word to producers at the next stop, Los Angeles International Airport, to expect a premature end to the team’s race.
“We were planning on eliminating this particular team,” said Phil Keoghan, the show’s host, “because there was no way they were going to travel.” A lost passport, he noted, led to a team’s dismissal two years earlier.
But this time, Twitter saved the day. Ryan Storms, a graphic artist and photographer who shares much about his life and promotes his business on Twitter, had been at the gas station and had given directions to Ms. Paliotta and Ms. Tilley. Shortly thereafter, when he spotted the lost passport, he described it on Twitter and wrote, “Looks like I have to look her up on Facebook.”
Mr. Keoghan said Mr. Storms’s messages were spotted right away by an anonymous “uber fan” of the show in Georgia who was apparently monitoring all Twitter mentions of “The Amazing Race.” Such fans act as “Amazing Race” detectives, tracking movements of contestants and discerning who might be winning along the way. The fan quickly replied to Mr. Storms, saying, “She’ll need her passport! Can you get it to LAX?”
Mr. Keoghan said with a chuckle, “He was forced into saving Kaylani.”
Also monitoring online mentions of the show were “Amazing Race” producers in Taiwan. When they saw the passport chatter, they informed counterparts in Los Angeles there might be hope for the team, after all.
“The information went all the way to Taiwan before it came back to us,” said Mr. Keoghan, who had hurried to the airport to conduct the elimination.
Mr. Storms hurried to the airport too. “I would hope that if it was me that had lost my passport, someone would have returned it,” he wrote in an e-mail message. He arrived in time, and the close call was turned into a plot point on Sunday’s premiere of the new season.
Mr. Storms’s final Twitter message that day read: “I’m joining the Amazing Race!”
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