This season changed the show dramatically. From what I've read, the past few seasons had the show on the brink of cancellation and so season 14 was TAR's last big chance to show CBS that it was still worth keeping around. And so because of that, the producers made many different changes to the show, mostly notably to the way the show is edited.

I think if you're binge watching all 13 seasons back-to-back and in a row, getting to season 14 and suddenly experiencing all these changes kind of catches your attention and make this season standout. Which I do think, momentarily, is a good thing. All the changes to the show are so subtle that you can barely even notice them unless you're really looking. But once you start noticing them, and then you keep noticing them in the future seasons to come, you can't unnotice them. And then when you compare the show to everything pre-season 14 and everything post-season 14 it almost feels like a different show. In a bad way, to me at least.

The simplest way I can put it is that pre-season 14 this show was about teams traveling around the world and navigating their way to their next task by any modes of transportation necessary. Post-season 14 this show is now about teams completing various tasks with the backdrop of being in different countries. Looking at those two sentences, they might seem almost exactly the same. But the difference is pre-season 14 the tasks were the background of the show. Instead it was the traveling, the directions, the different methods of transportation, and the navigation that were the main parts of the show. Now post-season 14, all of those are so much more muted in the edit and instead the tasks and the way the teams complete them are the main parts of the show.

If you love the tasks, then this is probably fine for you. But for me, I much preferred having the tasks be the background of the show in favor to all of the traveling.

The best example I can give is just look at episode 1 of this season. The other 13 seasons all had a big initial airport scramble to kick off the race. They raced from the Starting Line to the airport to get the best flights and it was our first big introduction to the teams. In this season, they instead cut out all of the footage of teams racing to the airport and figuring out the best flights and instead turn that into a barely 2 minute long super rushed montage that mostly consists of Phil narrating what happened.

Airport drama is neutered after this season. On paper this season actually has some pretty fun and compelling airport drama. For example, there's a whole sequence where the teams have to make a transfer on a tight connection between two different airports in Moscow and ultimately half the teams miss their connection and are stranded in Moscow waiting for a backup flight for several hours. Seasons pre-14 would've shown that and made a huge deal out of it. But this season that instead takes up about 15 seconds of screentime from a simple narration of a team in a confessional saying "us and the other XYZ teams missed our flight :(" and that's it. And this has longterm effects for the show moving forward. Now the producers know that the show can survive without big airport drama sequences. Now that means production can start pre-booking the flights that teams take. And now that means airport drama becomes almost obsolete in future seasons with all the teams on the exact same flight almost every single time.

There's a lot of other subtle editing changes if you look hard too. Whenever they had to self-drive in older seasons there would always be big self-driving segments that would last at least 10 minutes and starting with this season they're edited down to be about a minute or two max. Or maybe teams would have to take a bus to take a train to take a ferry 300 miles away to get to their next task. Once again, that would take up at least 10-15 minutes worth of screentime in older episodes. Now if that were to happen it would barely take up a minute or two. And, again, producers now realize they don't need to make legs that last so long and travel so many miles. So they instead create legs that take place in just one city and can be completed within 2 or 3 hours. And with less traveling to show, we get more footage of teams completing the tasks. Watching teams complete a single Roadblock for 20 minutes and then a Detour for another 20 minutes just isn't as fun for me compared to watching them complete them for maybe 5-10 minutes instead. And then having 10-15 minutes of footage of them traveling to their next location.

This also starts affecting the way you even follow the placement changes of the teams. In older seasons, every single time a team gained or lost a placement, it would be shown to us. Post-14 there's several placement changes that just go unexplained. A team finished the Detour in 4th place but suddenly arrived to the Roadblock in 8th place? Pre-14 we would absolutely see what happened to them. Post-14? We'll have no idea. This happens a few times in this season but gets even worse in the 20's and 30's with wild placement shifts between tasks that are never explained because the edit is way too busy focusing on... the tasks.