Video: "Smash Lab" on Discovery
Discovery sent me this commercial for "Smash Lab," a new show in the Mythbusters vein. It looks okay, although I have to make a confession: I find Mythbusters sort of boring. I'm not sure why, either. On paper it's totally up my alley.
I think it's because the hosts are sort of dreary. Or maybe they're fine, but I've become spoiled by Top Gear's presenters.
Oh, which reminds me: How do I audition to be a host of the American version of Top Gear? I know it'll probably be a pale imitation of the U.K. original—which given the Anglocentric nature of Clarkson & Co., would make it nearly transparent—but I still harbor a little steamboat of hope that it could be a show worth watching.
Anyway, here's your one free commercial, Discovery!
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There could never be a US Top Gear because of advertising.
Clarkson tried to make a US show years ago and left from fustration when advertising pressure on the network stopping him slagging off or trashing cars.
It's easy: wear jeans you bought from Target with the suit jacket you bought for the last wedding you went to, get a newspaper column in which you describe driving very fast, very expensive cars in embarrassingly near-sexual terms, make snarky comments about RVs and sensibly priced cars and foolishly publish your bank details in said common assuming no-one can get into your account.
I've watched both and I dunno.. Mythbusters seems on par with Top Gear for the excitement, I mean you usually can get the sense of need for explosions from either of the two main hosts.
If you want the job Joel, you need to work on a couple of things. Firstly, practice giving something awesome a great review, then getting someone to ask you if you'd buy it. Your answer should always be "No". Follow up with some kind of spurious reason not to like it.
Secondly, whenever you end a paragraph, construct your sentence with an ellipsis ... like this.
Examples: "The Bugatti Veyron is the world's best car. Would I have one? No. I can't fit my golf sticks in it."
"The Macbook Air is an unbelievable piece of technology... for a door stop."
Bonus tips: Use the word "crikey" a lot, and buy yourself an Alfa Romeo.
I can do all these things! I'm really close on this one!
Oh, don't forget a guttural laugh accompanied by "morrrre powerrrr." Make sure you say the 400hp car isn't fast enough because the competition has 475hp.
Strangely, I'm the exact same way about Mythbusters. I should love it. But I can't stand it. I think that might be because it borrows too much from the "evening news" type presentation: Here's a bit of lead-up, and then we'll show you the rest later! Oh Hi, here's a little more lead-up, but no, we'll show you the rest later.
I like the hosts, but the production values are far, far lower than Top Gear. Top Gear has some of the best camera work, sound editing, and soundtrack selection of any show on television right now. It's just phenomenal. I'm a confessed car addict, while my wife doesn't share that passion at all. But she still loves watching Top Gear. It doesn't hurt that Richard Hammond is so damn cute and charming, but overall I think it's because the three play off each other so well and the show's crew does such a stellar job with the rest of it.
Woah, that was longer than I intended.
Tried to watch Smash Lab a little last night. Surprisingly dull for a show about 'splosions.
I do watch Mythbusters--though I liked it better before they added the second team; something about those three gets on my nerves (The tokenism?)--but I made it all of 7 or 8 minutes into Smash Lab last night before giving up. I was bored to tears.
Still have yet to see Top Gear, though. My cable provider doesn't carry BBC America.
I enjoyed Mythbusters for awhile -- perhaps three months -- but then the constant repetition got to me. I don't need a recap of the entire show upon returning from every commercial break. I realize this is to caputre channel surfers, but still...
However, I *do* like the second team. Particulalry Grant, with his unabashed geekitude.
I also tried watching Smash Lab, but it was unbearable. It seems pretty pointless. The things they're "testing" are not things the people don't know about. They're not discovering anything new, they're just taking cars and crashing them to retest things we already know. That's what makes Mythbusters cool, they're testing things that I've wanted to test myself but don't have the resources and things that haven't been tested. It's annoying when they get caught up in just getting a big explosion on mythbusters, or lack the scientific accuracy they really need, or test things that are already proven...which seems like exactly what Smashlab is all about.
Plus, Discovery was running that commercial nonstop for the past few weeks.
@10: I agree totally. There are already real engineers paid to work from 9 to 5 to find out safer ways to build highways, bridges, buildings, products, etc, and they don't have to worry about making good TV.
Why don't they instead try getting permission to film tests at Underwriters Laboratory, where they routinely test new products for safety and compliance? I'm sure there'd be a few problems making this unrealistic, but at least it would be more appealing than what Smash Lab has come up with.
Then again, they've only shown one episode so far. Part of the problem is probably that they just tested one thing, aerated cement's effectiveness against car crashes.
Also, it kind of bugged me about how they tried to always make the team look cool, as though they were in an action movie. I can't list them all, but there were a ton of cliches, like showing all of the members of the team walking in sync in slow motion, and then sitting down all at once. Mythbusters is more watchable because the show has a mild self-deprecating streak. The announcer's jokes are corny, and the scripted sequences always have members of the crew fighting back laughs, but it's humanizing. The cast of Mythbusters are real, down to Earth people, personality-wise, in comparison to the sort of people you see in shows that try to be cooler than they actually are, i.e. Smash Labs and Man vs. Wild.
"I find Mythbusters sort of boring. I'm not sure why, either. On paper it's totally up my alley. I think it's because the hosts are sort of dreary."
You, sir, have no soul. I find Adam and Jamie charming. I will not comment on Kari Byron, because I would probably get in trouble with my girlfriend.
In all honesty, I can see why you might not like it if you only watched a few episodes, but it (and by it, I mean the people and the experiments) really grows on you after a few episodes.
@9 is correct. This seems to be a Discovery Channel thing. All their shows consist of 30 minutes of content, 15 minutes of recapping the content, and 15 minutes of advertising. All their shows do this. It's stupid, annoying, and makes their shows boring.
Adam and Jamie should shop Mythbusters around to another channel.
I used to feel the same way about Mythbusters -- that I *should* like it -- and was puzzled about why I didn't.
But then my 4-year-old got totally addicted to it; so much so that she taught herself how to use the TiVo so she could get a consistent fix.
I realized I had been confused about the target audience. A Mythbusters aimed at *me* would have better production values and waaay more attention to accuracy. It would go into technical detail and follow up on observations that were interesting or surprising ("once we saw that low-powered bullets penetrated further into the water than high-powered rounds, we decided to talk to Dr. Foo of the USF physics faculty..."). It would feature a lot of well-designed infographics and would take a 10-minute detour to explain how those shock-detection stickers work.
But it's not aimed at me; it's aimed at kids, who can actually learn something from it. Once you get that essential bit of context, you can enjoy it for what it is; a show that draws kids in with car crashes and explosions and then drills into them the basics of the scientific method. That's pretty cool, when you think about it.
The key to watching Mythbusters is to DVR it, then not let up on the fast forward until ~1 minute past the commercials. Less recap, better flow, nd you can watch an entire episode in about 20 minutes without missing anything.
The key to watching Top Gear is to sit around in a smoking jacket drinking sherry and agree with everything in your best British accent. Bonus points if you can convince your S/O to answer to Jeeves or something and dress in a servant's outfit. Example: Top Gear is showing the new Ferrari Unobtainioso doing 500 mph through Southby's auction house. You say,"Yes, yes, I QUITE like the styling, but it would be so bloody hard to scrape the carcasses of pedestrians off of the trim. Jeeves, more sherry."
The key to watching Smash Labs is to fast forward through everything except the explosions. And maybe the cute scientist. But mainly the splosions.
by EdGore:
"I find Mythbusters sort of boring. I'm not sure why, either. On paper it's totally up my alley. I think it's because the hosts are sort of dreary."
You, sir, have no soul. I find Adam and Jamie charming.
Charming, personable, but not scientific. They said in one episode I watched, "Now, this isn't how a scientist might do it, but we're going to do it this way..." ...and that was enough for me, for the most part.
Then, I saw they had a "Ninja Myths" episode, so I taped* it. They were trying to get a (mechanical) hand to catch an arrow, but the arrow was "too fast" for the hand to grip quickly enough. But they never tried firing the arrow from further than a foot away! That was truly enough.
*Yes, taped. Shut up.
Smash labs is truly awful. Discovery is getting more awful by the day.
SHOUTY VOICE over man sucks. Fake tension and outright lies (Oil, Sweat and Rigs, Bear Gryphis). Endless recaps, reprises, teases and the same footage over and over and over. They throw millions of dollars into projects that are worse than 6yr old's school science. They think their audience are dumb, because they are dumb and coked up in brainstorming meetings and focus group sessions. Discovery could be good, but it's stuck in rut of Mythbusters clones, big construction (anyone for another giant quarry truck?) and sharks. Do something orginal.