Watch first 5 minutes of ‘The Amazing Race’ season 37 premiere (exclusive)

The Amazing Race will kick off its 37^th season March 5 on CBS, but you don’t have to wait until then to watch host Phil Keoghan arch his eyebrow. That’s because we’ve got the first five minutes of the premiere exclusively for you right here and right now.

Not only do we get a super sneak peek at some of the twists, turns, and drama to unfold the season, with Keoghan promising that “emotions will run high as the tension builds to a final showdown,” but we get to bear witness to start of the Race, as the host explains to the teams that “this season there are more big surprises than ever before.” He also warns them about the new Fork in the Road and the impending double elimination at the conclusion of the first leg. (Rude.)

But don’t take my word for it. Watch all the action in the video above to see which teams flourish and falter right out of the gate, as they race out of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for their first destination: Hong Kong.

We also spoke to Keoghan to get some teases on what to expect on the rest of the season 37 premiere.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: First off, do you have to do any eyebrow arching exercises to get in shape for the new season?

PHIL KEOGHAN: Yeah, normally I work out every day, and then part of my routine is 10 eyebrow arches. It’s written in my contract that I can only do a certain number, otherwise they have to pay me bonus eyebrow money. So I can do three pops per show. That’s it. It gets expensive if I do too many of those.

What can you tell us about the Fork in the Road and how that plays out with two separate races happening as teams have to decide which course to take?

That’s something we’ve been talking about for a while. I think ultimately, it’s going to be up to the fans to let us know whether they want us to do it again and whether they think it worked. There’s been a number of ideas that we’ve talked about over the years that we’ve wanted to try and implement. And the network was really keen on having a different big surprise in every single episode on top of the standard surprises that we have every time. So this seemed to make a lot of sense, and let’s see what happens if we force teams to have to make a decision to go left or right.

There’s a lot of strategy at play because it’s like, “Well, how many people went left and how many people went right? And then what is it on the left and what is it on the right and does it make sense to do this?” It could be a team gets there and most people have gone left and that’s the thing that you and I maybe think we can do the best, but hardly anybody’s gone on the other path. And then we’re like, “If we go left, we’re going to be behind, even though that’s probably what we want to do, but we really probably need to go right because there’s less people there and maybe we take our chances there.” So there’s a lot of really good strategy involved with it.

What is it like for you having a double elimination on the very first leg? I know you love the competition, but you’re also an empathetic guy and I always feel so bad for those people that go out first.

Yeah, it’s the hardest thing. You go through that whole casting process for months and sometimes if you look at Nick and Mike for instance, those guys tried to get on the show for seven years. So God forbid you’re in a situation where you’ve got to eliminate them first out of the gate. You don’t want that to happen, but, of course, it all comes out in the mix.

You just don’t know who’s going to go, but somebody’s got to go, and then to look in their eyes and maybe they’ve only been on the Race for 24 hours, that’s tough. And you’re standing there at the mat and you realize, “Oh my God, 24 hours ago we were standing at the start line and now we’ve got this double elimination.”

That’s really tough to do and to execute. You want people to go long. And I’m not going to lie, there are times where we’re eliminating teams that we wish we weren’t eliminating because you really had high expectations and sometimes there’s a direct correlation between the teams that are most interesting and the ones that go out the earliest. So Murphy’s Law.

I’m not allowed to have favorites, but there’s definitely times where I’m like, “Oh man, what I wouldn’t do to have them stick around just because I think they think they’re going to get more and more interesting.” People say to me sometimes with the non-elimination legs — “Oh, you guys must just make it up.” And I’m like, “You have no idea. You have no idea how impossible that is to do.”

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