| Monday, November 22, 2010 |
08:46 - A Series of Challenges
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Well, Top Gear USA has bowed. And... well, it's just about what I expected it to be.
Not particularly good, downright unwatchable in places, but with hidden sparks here and there of something that might be worthwhile someday, if it lives long enough.
The biggest single problem is also the least surprising: the lack of chemistry between the hosts. There's just nothing there. These guys seem like they were just thrown together in a casting call, without any foreknowledge of each other's personalities and foibles, which is probably exactly what happened. The result is that the only thing anyone can rib Tanner Foust—the drifting superstar—about is not picking the fastest of the three Lamborghinis, and the other guys we don't know anything more about than Foust does. Just a couple of floating microphones. I can't even remember their names; just that there's this Kevin Smith Light guy who keeps making jokes out of 1995 ("The Viper is like the girl you don't bring home to Mother." "Ooh! Ooh! It's like Pamela Anderson!"), and then there's this mole-faced Cake Boss guy who gets so flustered by a violent straight-line acceleration run that his hands shake. I guess those right there might be the seeds of things to make fun of them for—a stupid sense of humor and an inability to drive—but only if the show's writers see fit to acknowledge them, rather than writing such blatant, transparent, cheesy material as what we got in this outing.
Any fan of Top Gear knows that the reason to watch it is the repartée between the hosts, making fun of each other's clothes and teeth and hair and buying decisions. The cars are almost incidental. The mistake that the USA show seems to be making right off the bat is treating the cars as the stars of the show, as though people are tuning in just because they wouldn't otherwise ever have a chance to see a Viper kicking up tire smoke or a Gallardo Superleggera barreling down a track.
And looked at in that way, I suppose it has a chance, in a weird way. Most of the audience they're going for has never seen the UK version, and they've had no preparation for anything like this. This will literally be something new. They won't have any unreasonable expectations. And just that might buoy them through the first difficult season where they try to find their feet and some subject matter that's simply silly and entertaining rather than a giant Mercedes-sponsored car commercial.
Let's grant that the UK show is not flawless. Far from it. There are definitely times when its "scriptedness" shows through, even in ostensibly off-the-cuff segments like the News (yes, it's funny as hell how Jeremy says James would direct a porn film, but the fact is that James would never have said "Well, I think I'd direct quite a good porn film!" if he wasn't explicitly setting up a joke for Jeremy to harvest). And it's taken them many seasons to develop a formula and episode structure that reliably works. For years they kept throwing in segments that were plain boring and stupid (the used-car prices, the "let's restore some barn find car that you call in and vote on", even the Cool Wall got old), but gradually they got rid of the deadwood. Once in a while it's nice to stir up the pot with some random unprecedented concept out of the blue, but they won their way toward the current structure through a lot of hard-earned experience, and the least the US guys could do is capitalize on it.
I must say, though: I'm getting some terrible flashbacks to the Drew Carey adaptation of Whose Line Is It Anyway. They dumbed that show down for the US audience, and it became impoverished and formulaic to the point where there was never even any mystery to which comedian was going to do which inevitable bit. In the UK version everything was always unexpected and there were a tremendous number of far more literate game styles, and a host who could play the English language like an instrument. The Drew Carey version ended up being like a Simple English version of a Wikipedia page. I feel like I don't want to tell these guys to imitate a formula or it'll turn out the same way, but so far they're being even less imaginative and adventurous than a typical latter-day UKTG episode.
There are some definite pluses. The test track is great; the camera angles are excellent (at least, the external ones are); and the driving is genuinely top-notch. The Stig knows what the hell he's doing, whoever he is. And even in the hosts there's an occasional spark that gives me hope that one day they'll figure out why the millions of Americans who BitTorrent the BBC show every week will stick to doing that over watching this homegrown version any day. Hans Moleman swearing in terror every time he upshifts was one of them. But at the same time, for every moment like that, there's five or six like the disastrous interview with Buzz Aldrin, who appeared every bit as out-to-lunch as he was on Space Ghost Coast to Coast fifteen years ago. Note to host: an interview is not just going down a list of cars that the guest has owned and the guest going "Oh, yes, that was a great little car". Be funny, for God's sake. Or at least book some stars who can show you how it's done.
Like Adam Carolla.
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Brian Tiemann
