| Thursday, December 25, 2008 |
15:18 - Top Gear USA slips into neutral
http://www.tvsquad.com/2008/12/20/nbc-kills-top-gear-usa/
|
(top) |
Snuh:
NBC had planned to bring the popular BBC and BBC America car show Top Gear to us yanks. Instead, NBC has decided to cut its brake cables in the middle of a brilliant power slide.
The official Top Gear blog announced that NBC won't air their US version of the show as a mid-season replacement in 2009.
This means the show and their hosts, Adam Carolla, Eric Stromer and Tanner Foust, are up to grabs for the highest bidder like a drug dealer's impounded Cadillac Escalade at a municipal car auction.
But the saddest news is just around the corner. The gearhead blog Jalopnik reported that the reasons NBC passed on the show were the production costs and the failure of their dismal Knight Rider remake. Well, I'm sure the cars on Top Gear won't talk, so what's the problem?
I suppose I can see standing with those commentators who see this as a good thing. Better to have it never made than to have it get made and suck, and then to have execs misinterpret the reasons for its failure just as badly as they misinterpreted "durr, it gots carz" as a common poison-pill element between TGUSA and Knight Rider.
Just give us the real show in a non-localized version. It's plenty entertaining and plenty relevant just the way it is. And besides, as much as I love Adam Carolla, some of us like Brit-wit. Maybe even a market's worth of us. What TV exec has managed to miss the fact that Monty Python was so much more popular in the USA than it ever was in Britain?
|
|
Brian Tiemann
