I engaged in a little actor-from-another-cool-show spotting as well. About twenty minutes in I found myself saying, “Hey, isn’t that D’Angelo’s mom?” I was right, it was Michael Hyatt who played Brianna Barksdale on The Wire.
You have clearly forgotten the first rule of Italian racing.
Yeah, I’ve seen him before, though I haven’t seen those three movies. I know I’ve seen him doing character work in TV shows.
The First rule of Italian racing is… you do not talk about Italian racing! 
Yep, this is too good to be on for too long, but I hope to be proven wrong.
I had assumed that eliminating meant someone had to die, but then I thought…if people keep getting eliminated by each person who comes in last at each stop, then how could the race keep going? So…there must be other kinds of penalties awaiting the laggers.
I always think of him as the government agent chasing Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen in Starman.
Ooh, ooh! Here’s another! The guy who told the young mother “don’t be last” played the bookstore owner/conspiracy theorist who burned himself down at Jasmine’s request in a Season 4 episode of Angel.
Not bad…not bad at all. This could develop into something very interesting, which of course means it will be cancelled within a month.
For those who don’t believe that something like this could happen for years without anybody at large knowing about it should remember that the “Sea To Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash” ran from New Jersey to Santa Monica, CA every few years for over a decade without the public at large knowing anything about it. They actually thought the movies “Gumball Rally” and Cannonball Run" were total fiction.
If Cannonball Run is fiction, I don’t want to live in the real world.
A few minor corrections to my previous, now that I have had my coffee:
The start point was either NYC or Darien, CT depending on the race. The end point was Redondo Beach, not Santa Monica. The record set in the last race was 32 hours 51 minutes coast to coast.
I watched about 20 minutes of the second hour. I turned it off. Nathan Fillion nor Melanie Lynskey are enough to make me watch a soap-opera on wheels.
I had my DVR set to record the typical Sunday cartoon block on Fox and when I played it later in the night and saw that some new show was on it I was a little miffed. I stuck with it and ended up getting pretty hooked. I’m not a Whedon junky, though I really enjoyed the Serenity movie, so I guess this was little more than some random midseason replacement show on FOX doomed to a early and merciful death to me as the promos aired over the last month.
Glad to find that it looks like it could be much better than that. The Whedon-styled dialog with Fillian is pretty engrossing and there’s lots of great one liners. I’m a little concerned about the long-term prospects of a show like this. Each episode is one-leg so far and they’ve been doing about a leg a day. That pace is unrealistically slow since each of those journeys is only about a 3-6 hour trip at normal highway speeds. If this show were to have a full run that’d be upwards of 20 days to drive cross country, too slow. And then what the hell do they do for subsequent seasons unless they completely blow up the premise? All in all, I’m a little worried about what will happen if I decide to really jump on board with this show.
One complaint, all the scenes with Melanie Lynskey were just painfully bad to the point that they are difficult to watch. I love Two and a Half Men and her character there is pretty entertaining, but it’s delivered in small doses and her utter lack of emoting fits her character. In this show however, that flatness doesn’t lend itself to “quirky”, instead it just looks like a complete and utter waste of screentime. Then again, I’m not sure I could stomach a realistic battered, fragile woman who is frantic over her absent newborn for a full season either. Would probably be too damn melodramatic week-to-week.
So far I’ve found all the clues given to be extremely easy to deduce and knew them before the onscreen reveal. In a way I hope that changes and the puzzles play a slightly bigger role occasionally. Would make for a nice variety, have some episodes about Tully trying to unravel who’s behind it, others just about racing, and others about deducing some complicated clues.
Anyways, I set the DVR to record every episode and I hope it stays put. Jericho made it about 4 episodes before I bailed, so I’m due for another one to stick.
The driving sequences during the opening credits were certainly CG.
There was a lot of the camera pulling out of one camera, to a highway scene, and then into another car.
I actually got to the point where it was kind of a distraction when they didn’t do it.
-Joe
No problem with subsequent seasons. Look at the number of people who are involved in the race. I’ll bet that about halfway through the season we’ll start seeing the first legs through the experiences of other participants. They could take 4 years to tell the story of one year’s race, easily. They always have new characters to explore, and new vantages to view events from. Clever construction, really. I hope it flies.
I really don’t think that would work. Alex Tully and his partner are clearly the main focus of the story and Fillion is the closest thing to a big star in this show. No way in hell they step away from him and his progress for entire episodes over and over.
Keep in mind that a cross country road race should be finished in about 2 days. If you want to make it a stage a day like it seems to be structured you’ve got about 2-weeks worth of travel. I’m at a loss to see how they’ll manage a 22-episode season in that timeframe without seriously stepping away from the race premise, let alone multiple seasons unless they somehow manage a huge reset over-and-over again without alienating their audience.
Unless things change dramatically I’m guessing they’ve set themselves up for failure by writing themselves into a corner with the underlying premise.
THAT’S WHERE I KNEW HIM FROM!!! Thank you! It was bugging me, but I didn’t know the character’s name so I didn’t think it would be very useful to look it up on imdb.
Well, I just hope someone on the writing team is creative enough to figure it all out.
Just some WAGs for scenarios:
Tulley (?) wins the race, they kill the wife anyway, and the rest of the series is spent tracking them down.
And get the original artists, dammit! 
I do too. I want this show to work. I’m guessing that the “route” will probably be very erratic with lots of backtracking to account for the extended journey. Hope they can pull that off without making too many viewers roll their eyes in frustration. In the first two episodes (assuming episode 3 starts with them at the next checkpoint) they managed to cover the ground between Key West and Rome, Georgia over about 2 days which is a pace even the most confused blue-hair could probably match.
Have they said this will be a 22 episode ‘year’? Maybe it could be splitting that time slot with Prison Break – PB gets Fall/Winter, Drive gets Spring/Summer.
And perhaps each season could be a new race, with some team winning in the final episode, and then the next season starting with an entire new cast of racers.
You’d lose some in audience attachment to a particular group of actors. OTOH, they might be able to get ‘better’ actors than usual for a show like this if the actors know it was a limited commitment.