| Saturday, August 7, 2010 |
06:04 - An idea whose time has come ... and gone
http://jalopnik.com/5606884/top-gear-usa-the-first-trailer
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Color me skeptical but slightly optimistic: here's the teaser trailer for Top Gear USA.
No Adam Carolla, for whatever reason. My first reaction is that the hosts all look the same and are way too supportive of each other. But my second is that we have no idea how these guys all actually act when they're establishing their own characters and chemistry. Maybe they really have given up on the idea of trying to recreate Top Gear with American clones of the British presenters.
Which is probably the way it should happen, if they're going to do it at all. I mean, the whole concept seems superfluous; we already have the real thing on BBCA, and if the producers think the American audience is failing to follow it because they can't understand the accents or the local politics or car brands like Vauxhall and Citroën, they need to talk to a few car people. Everyone loves it just as it is.
If the show is being created by people who think there's domestic advertising money that can be made from a domestic Top Gear, they must be fully aware that all those advertisers will be car companies, and therefore the show won't be able to slam bad cars. This isn't the BBC. So I guess they must be redesigning the format of the show to focus more on the challenges, the feats of driving, the... character interplay?
Top Gear strikes a balance between omniscient voice-overs explaining truths about the auto industry and goofy first-person driving experiences by a trio of misfits whose foibles we're all intimately familiar with. Character is all-important to the existing show. Without it even Top Gear would be unwatchable.
The only way Top Gear USA would not be is if it's being cast as a completely different kind of show.
I'll definitely watch it, just out of morbid curiosity. This trailer makes it look like they've got at least the building blocks in place. But there's so much more that's all still up in the air.
I think it'll suffer without Carolla, I really do. No matter what kind of show it is. He would have been perfect.
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Brian Tiemann
