The great thing about the original British Top Gear is that the show grabs you by the balls like a crazed terrier on acid, and refuses to let go until you get to the end.
On the other hand the American Top Gear is somewhat like a fuzzy copy of a copy of a copy. It’s not that the show doesn’t have all of the ingredients for a magnificent automotive stew, it’s just that we’ve been there and done that before with the Brits…and they do it much better.
In order to really flourish American Top Gear needs to bring something new to the dinner table besides supercars and super production values.
Sure, it’s tons better than Motorweek, but so is watching an anemic snail cross the road.
Here are a few questions that we can’t seem to figure out.
1) Why do you even need the Stig when Tanner Faust is a professional and apparently very tame race car driver?
2) Why didn’t the attack helicopter in tonight’s episode fire real bullets or at least paint balls?
3) Why did the producer start with a film based on a lame midlife crises car that was last cool when Bill Clinton was in office, and worse yet today could easily be beat around any track by a four door Cadillac (read CTS-V)?
4) What’s up with the silly stand around a campfire set? It barely works for the Brits, and in the American version the audience looks bored and uncomfortable.
Of course the show does have potential. In the second half of tonight’s episode the American host seem to have the start of what might be considered chemistry. Comedian Adam Ferrara, race car driver Tanner Faust and racing analyst Rutledge Wood at first seemed wooden and stilted, but by the end of the hour they had loosened up so that watching them wasn’t painful anymore.
We can’t help but feel the show desperately needs someone as bombastic and full of himself like Jeremy Clarkson to anchor it. Perhaps the worse problem with American Top Gear is that it has forgotten the first and most important rule of successful reality TV: you need a villain or an anti-hero, someone to stir the pot, someone to pour gas on the fire, and someone to yell fire in a crowded theater after he’s poured gas on the fire.
Perhaps American Top Gear will succeed and find an audience, but if it doesn’t our bet would be that it’s because they forgot to cast Jeremy Clarkson, or his American cousin.
What do you think of American Top Gear? Please let us know in the comments below.
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