Flop Gear

June 20th, 2016

More Bomb Than Bombshell

I have something important to write about today. The new Top Gear is really bad.

I got in the habit of recording TV shows because it gave me something to do when I took the birds out of their cages. Sometimes they interact with me a lot, but Maynard really likes standing on my ankle and staring into space, so his out time is not always exciting. Top Gear became a favorite. I don’t care all that much about cars, but I love good comedy, especially when it’s politically conservative.

Jeremy Clarkson was the soul of the show. He turned it into the biggest TV franchise on the planet, and on his watch, they brought in James May and Richard Hammond, two of the funniest TV hosts in existence.

If the BBC suits had had their way (I am guessing without proof), the show probably would have been about hideous practical cars actual people could afford, and it would have been full of boring information about mileage and reliability. Instead, it’s about ridiculous supercars that cost seven figures, and they spend a lot of time crushing stuff and blowing things up.

Clarkson had a lot of problems. Sometimes he offended hippies in ways no one cares about, but he had a few incidents that appeared to reveal racist tendencies. For example, he and Richard Hammond looked at a wobbly bridge in the Burma, just as an Asian man walked onto it, and Clarkson said there was “a slope on it.”

I don’t know why Hammond didn’t get in trouble, since he was part of the joke.

Clarkson kept offending, and he was put on double-secret probation. Then he flipped out and punched a Top Gear employee. Something about not being able to get a steak.

The Beeb finally had to give principle more weight than greed, and Clarkson was “sacked,” as the British like to say. It conjures images of limp bodies of former employees being carried out of their workplaces in burlap bags.

I agree with their decision. You can’t let employees hit each other. It was cute when he punched Piers Morgan, but that was on his own time, and it was a public service for which he should have received a knighthood. Punching a subordinate is not acceptable.

Fans lost their minds, as though a frivolous TV show were essential to the survival of the universe. They cluttered the show’s cringing, defensive, groveling Facebook posts with comments reading, “Bring back Clarkson, Hammond, and May!”

Hammond and May joined in, refusing to work on the show without Clarkson. Maybe they’re loyal, or maybe they understand what a huge talent he is, and they want the money to keep pouring in. The merry trio departed the BBC and signed up for a show on Amazon Prime, which is apparently a network. If you’ve never heard of it, join the club. To me, “Amazon Prime” means a sucker deal where Amazon charges you a hundred bucks a year to bring your packages on time. Maybe people in England watch Amazon TV, but I have never felt like tuning in.

In the meantime, the BBC has made a lot of horrible errors.

1. They started 2016 with a whole bunch of reruns featuring the old cast, reminding people how great they were and that they would be impossible to replace. They’re still doing this, even though the new hosts are in place.

2. They hired Chris Evans, a squeaky-voiced Celt (perhaps I repeat myself) who collects supercars, to replace the boys. I don’t even know what to say about this. Evans is the opposite of funny. He is incapable of ad-libbing, he has no delivery, he is lacking even the rudiments of car-aficionado masculinity, and he throws up during fast laps. The man THROWS UP.

He seems like a nice guy, but he’s so boring I fast-forward through his segments. That’s how bad it is. He makes me feel sorry for him. I never felt bad for the others. Not even when they were driving through India in the summer and Hammond and May fixed Clarkson’s car so the heat couldn’t be turned off.

3. After they hired Chris Evans and made him look like a big deal, they faltered and hired Matt LeBlanc, the American comic actor and holder of the fastest Top Gear celebrity lap time. There are a number of problems with this.

First, LeBlanc is a riot. He is highly, highly talented. He knows cars. He has magnificent comic timing, and he is likeable. He even looks good and appears to produce testosterone. You can picture him with a wrench in his hand. He is everything Chris Evans is not. The contrast makes things awkward.

Second, they didn’t hire the hosts at the same time. When the BBC brought LeBlanc in, it looked like they realized how bad Chris Evans was and decided to undermine him, and this is probably exactly what happened. It makes Evans look threatened, which he clearly is. More awkwardness.

Third, they never came up with a third host. England is packed with funny performers, and they couldn’t find one. So now instead of a versatile three-man dynamic, they have two guys who look like they’re trying to cut each other’s throats. More accurately, it looks like Chris Evans has already had his throat cut, and they’re just waiting for him to admit it.

4. They hired two lesser hosts who don’t appear during the main show. I forget their names. They have zero stage presence. They are not funny. They are not entertaining in any way. They have no chemistry with the audience or each other. And their presence makes it look like the BBC is waiting for Evans to get fed up and leave so one of them can move into his place. This is probably true.

5. They made the show an hour longer. LeBlanc and Evans host the first hour, and the two young guys drag us through the second. When you’re struggling for ideas and content, why would you increase production demand by a factor of two?

They need to can Evans (cans are sturdier than sacks) and find someone else. It’s a shame Jason Statham is too big for the job. He’d be perfect.

I would love to watch the new Clarkson show, which is called The Grand Tour, but how do you get it without sitting in front of the computer and paying for it? I get Top Gear with basic cable, so it feels like it’s free. I’m not going to shell out for a computer service and watch it on a 24″ monitor. Forget that.

If there’s one good thing about the 2016 season it is this: Maynard can’t tell the difference. He is happy to sit on my leg and watch anything I watch.

I hope Amazon finds some way to get the new show inserted into a cable channel real human beings will actually watch. Warts and all, Clarkson is giant surrounded by midgets.

5 Responses to “Flop Gear”

  1. Steve B Says:

    I’ve never watched Top Gear, so I have to little to add or kibbitz. Except to say that Amazon Prime is actually a pretty sweet deal. Since I live overseas right now, I end of having to order a lot of things online that I either can’t get here, or would be outrageously priced otherwise. So, for $80 bucks a year, I get free two-day shipping on 90% of what I buy on Amazon, plus lot of free streaming music and pretty good chunk of Kindle books I can read for free. The free shipping alone pays probably for itself over the course of the year. I think it’s worth it. Maybe not if I lived in the States and hate 27 different mega-stores within 8 blocks, though.

  2. Monty James Says:

    Clarkson not only assaulted an underling, the man was smaller than he was. I don’t think much of picking on someone smaller than oneself. I’m guessing that there was some sort of settlement reached with the man he punched.

    But oh, Top Gear was so good. Top Gear USA, unwatchable on the History Channel, has mercifully been cancelled. Motor Trend has some sort of show on PBS, it isn’t any fun at all.

    It doesn’t solve your basic problem with paying for Amazon Prime, and adds another layer of expense on top of a subscription, but perhaps a Roku or Amazon Firestick device, or a smart tv would be the thing. No one can be comfortable watching shows at the computer desk.

  3. Steve H. Says:

    I didn’t know the American version was canceled. Sorry to hear that, but it was very bad, so no great loss.

    I’ll just be brutal and say it: the fat guy was terrible. He ruined the whole show. He was wimpy and soft and seemed to know nothing at all about cars. The British Top Gear guys aren’t macho men, but they’re not effeminate hipsters, either. They know as much about cars as mechanically inept people can. They’re genuine car lovers. The fat American guy seemed like the kind of person who would deal with a flat tire by sitting in the car and using his cell phone to call a real man.

    The writers for the American show were bad, too. And the Australian version is pretty wretched.

    The Italian guy on the American show was funny, and the professional driver wasn’t bad. He was really funny when he was showing up the other two. The fat guy was like a big wall of foam rubber that came between the funnier guys, absorbing all the humor.

  4. Steve H. Says:

    Well, I just learned some interesting things.

    The fat guy, Rutledge Wood, is a NASCAR analyst, whatever that is. Apparently, he does know something about cars. That’s a real shock. I don’t know why it fails to come through on the show. They really need to get rid of him and get someone with some personality.

    Also, The History Channel is making new episodes. Dreadful.

  5. Stephen McAteer Says:

    Clarkson is also a pretty decent journalist – he has a car column and a personal one, both in the Sunday Times. I was disappointed when he hit the underling. The settlement was quite significant I think.

    I used to watch Top Gear all the time but haven’t seen one episode of the Chris Evans one. Doesn’t sound like I’m missing much.

    I have Amazon Prime, which I think is a reasonable deal here in the UK. (I have 100Gb of photos backed up as part of the service.) I’ll tune in to the new show when it airs.