Amazon Prime’s new dog-adventure competition is bonkers and addictive

Sending dogs and their owners around the world looking for clues and scooting down ziplines seems like a bad idea, but I can’t stop watching The Pack

A few months ago, I received the screeners for nine of the ten episodes of The Pack, Amazon’s new Amazing Race competition for dogs. Expletives immediately rose from my head to the invisible sound balloon above me. I have a low, low tolerance for dog shows on television, in part because they are usually shaped by people who don’t know anything about dogs and they bend the lives of dogs and their owners to suit their own needs. A competition show, with dogs jetting around the world, seemed like a bad, bad idea. I did not click the bait.

But the pandemic makes us try new things, so some weeks later, in the middle of a rare open afternoon, I went back to it. The first episode confirmed all my fears. It is completely insane. The first episode opens with host Lindsay Vonn and her dog in an LA traffic jam that inexplicably becomes a reenactment of the opening number from La La Land, with people and their dogs bursting out of their cars and into an elaborately choreographed dance number that features Dennis Rodman and Denise Richards (for no apparent reason.) From…