`Amazing Race' bids farewell to Jonathan and Victoria

Reality television has a way of amplifying normal human greed, deceit or insecurity and creating classic villains from whole cloth. Sometimes, like with Richard Hatch on the first "Survivor," it's impossible not to root for the bad guys and admire their despicable moxy. Other times, like with "Big Brother 4" and "Amazing Race" star Alison Irwin, they make for great TV.

Jonathan Baker and Victoria Fuller, the married couple booted from "Amazing Race" on Tuesday, fit into a third category. Jonathan spent one episode after another berating his wife, throwing things at her and threatening her, even shoving her at one point. Victoria, hardly a dainty orchid, alternated between bawling, verbally abusing her mate and taunting him for every misstep.

The show's executive producer, Bertram van Munster, admits that while good villains are sometimes essential for dramatic conflict, Jonathan may have had a detrimental impact on the Emmy-winning franchise.

"He's brought people to the tube and he's scared people away," van Munster says. "I don't think it's a reflection on the show. It's a reflection on him."

Phil Keoghan, the show's often stoic host, takes a more optimistic view, pointing out that "Amazing Race" has often had polarizing contestants, referring to Flo from the third season.

"We're choosing people that we think are going to make interesting TV," he says.

Like most reality programs, "Amazing Race" has a very strict series of background checks that all contestants must face, but van Munster says that sterile interviews can only tell you so much.

"What you don't see is how they start to react under stress," notes van Munster. "Stress for different people is a different thing. If you come in and you think, 'I can do the race because I sit on the couch and watch each week for 44 minutes and have a beer' it's very different."

On his personal Web site and in the press, Jonathan has tried to insist that he went into the show determined to be the player viewers would love to hate. Van Munster scoffs at that notion.

"I never had the sense he was pretending for the cameras," he says. "When we interviewed him, we saw he definitely had an edge, so he was always that guy. When he got in the car in Iceland, he was that guy."

In a more recent attempt to justify his behavior, Jonathan has tried saying that all of his kinder and gentler moments were edited out, making him look like an abuser rather than, apparently, like an abuser prone to occasional kind moments.