Well, so far I’m not impressed with Mythbusters, the search. The conceit is that it’s a Survival type reality show whose goal is to select the next generation of Mythbusters. Ignoring the fact that the Jamie and Adam already tackled just about ever urban myth worth the name and were reduced to blowing shit up every week; it seems like it would be hard to select a worse and more cruel method of selecting new hosts for the show.
At least in the first episode, the show looked nothing like classical Mythbusters. Instead of being given a myth and figuring out how to tackle it, each team was given the same build task as a competition. One member of a team was given immunity and one, of course, is to be eliminated each week. But the team members weren’t at all tested on presentation or explanatory ability or even, really, problem solving. It was all build prowess. And the process they used to determine who would be eliminated was completely obscure (and disappointing, as they eliminated one of my favorites).
Given a choice, I would have eliminated the host who I found rather annoying and smarmy.
I dunno – if you want to do a reality show based on replicating variations of Mythbusters builds, I guess it could be OK. If you actually wanted to select new hosts for a Mythbusters show, I can’t think of how this format could possibly work.
I saw a few minutes of the Deflategate segment. One of the wanna-bes didn’t know what Deflategate was, the rest of them I doubt have ever handled a football in their lives yet judging if deflating a football makes it easier to comes down to how this bunch catches footballs.
That makes for some solid consistent results all right.
Terrible so far. Adam and Jamie had practical experience in the special effects industry. The candidates seemed for the most part to be entirely missing the ability to plan and produce the kind of demonstrations the show is based on.
Hackett is one of the contestants. A long time ago he had a TV show on one of the Discovery channels and I came to this very forum and panned it. And he showed up to defend it! All you butt-kissers fawned all over him but his show was cancelled in less than a season. This from a network that has run Ancient Aliens for years. Made me feel just the tiniest bit vindicated.
I think a better way to do this competition is to give them a myth to bust and have them, well, bust it. Like the OP said.
TV executives seem to be obsessed with that reality format; have teams compete, and one poor sod gets the hook. That’s not why I watched Mythbusters. The stuff they tried to do on that show was hard; even if everybody brought all their skill and talent, there were still gonna be failures before they got it right. Remember that early episode where Adam and Jamie each tried to build a hovercraft out of things like fans and leaf blowers? They both pretty much sucked. If they’d worked together they might have come up with something cool. I’d have rather seen that.
If the suits at the Science Channel can only think in terms of competition, fine. Mythbusters was a competition show; but it wasn’t Adam vs. Jamie, it was Adam and Jamie vs. “the problem” (whatever the problem was on any given show). If they want to find new mythbusters, that’s how they should approach it.
This show also reminds me of one from 2013 called The Big Brain Theory. Same format, same problem.
The good thing is they didn’t get caught up on the reality show drama. The bad thing(at least through one episode) is that it seemed very targeted to building rather than thinking. The interesting part is they only had two chicks, and got rid of one of them already. I’d be shocked if the other doesn’t make it to the end now.
Yeah, not all that great, but I think they are looking at other things off camera. For example, the made a point during the deflategate section that said they would rather have someone who couldn’t catch the ball but were able to laugh about it than someone who was serious and caught it every time. I do think they made the right decision in who they kicked off though. She was one dimensional skill wise (robotics and electronics) and it appeared she even screwed that part up.
The interesting dynamic was the Asian guy and the girl who won the “deflate gate challenge” A couple of times he said something slightly sexist or off color and she gave him a look like she would something she scraped off the bottom of her shoe.
I think(if they had continued) that they needed to get away from the non-myths(curving bullets-WTF?) or at least label them as debunking “Hollywood Physics” or some such.
Well, that was one huge problem with the first episode. Team blue pressurized their design and the apparatus went off prematurely. Cue douchebag host: “Well, that was bad. Very bad.”
Um, no, it wasn’t bad. The door blew off and the dummy was ejected. Myth confirmed. In actual Mythbusters, Adam would have laughed, they would have rejiggered the firing pin and tried again. In stupid, bizarro world reality show Mythbusters, it counts as a failure because a complicated device built in four days by amateurs didn’t work perfectly on the first go.
And yes, the Deflategate mythbusting was stupid. They shouldn’t have been trying to determine whether deflating a ball could make it easier for a tyro to catch; the goal was to determine whether a change in pressure creates an advantage that could be exploited by the most skilled professionals in the game when playing in adverse weather conditions.
I missed the first part (“deflategate”) but saw the last with the side ejectors. I agree, that was totally ridiculous! Firing pin maladjustment isn’t a failure, not when the device actually works as intended! Lame, stupid, contrived, and totally unnecessary ‘competition’.
Huh. I guess because I’ve been following his channel (well, the Nerdist) on YouTube for years I didn’t have the same impression. I rather like his videos so I guess that translates into being more forgiving with him as host.
Overall, I don’t like the survival type reality show format, so I wasn’t too impressed with the show overall. I agree it didn’t seem to test the people very well for how good or bad they would be doing a real Mythbusters episode themselves. I think the person who got eliminated got eliminated because she just didn’t have a lot of appeal wrt being on such a show, but eliminating her seemingly because she couldn’t catch a football (after seeing Grant’s, Adam’s, Kari’s and Jamie’s athletic abilities demonstrated :p) was a bit lame.
Still, there is potential in some of these guys, and I really hope that after the pain of this search show some of the real outstanding ones make it and can start the show going again with a fresh crew. The last few years, especially after they got rid of the younger ones just seemed to me to be going through the motions. There are tons of myths that still can be busted (I’d love to see them tackle the 9/11 myths for instance…you could do a bunch of shows just on that alone).
I suspect that Adam and / or Jamie (probably moreso Jamie, I’d guess) had gotten tired of the grind of it.
Another factor is that, whenever a TV series gets renewed, the people involved in the show get raises, particularly the on-screen talent. That was likely a major factor as to why the “Build Team” (Kari, Grant, and Tory) weren’t brought back for the final season of the original series, and you can bet that Adam and Jamie were getting very large salaries (as they are both the hosts, and executive producers).
Discovery Communicationts knows that the Mythbusters name and general format are still going to be an instant draw for fans of the show. They’re undoubtedly hoping that, if they can find a set of new hosts who are engaging and interesting (and far, far cheaper than the original talent), they’ll be able to get more out of the franchise.
I loved the original show, but a big part of why I loved it was the personalities of the hosts, and their interactions; by the end, I think that they’d long since bled the original premise of the show dry. Unless they manage to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time with the new cast, I don’t see it succeeding.
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I suspect that Adam and / or Jamie (probably moreso Jamie, I’d guess) had gotten tired of the grind of it.
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Yeah, I agree…I think there was juice left in the show but that the hosts had enough by then and just weren’t into it. In addition, I’ve heard there are some serious interpersonal relationship issues between Jamie and Adam that just seemed to get worse as things progressed. Not sure what the deal was with the younger ones and why exactly they were dropped for the last season, but I suspect it was more of the same there, plus the money thing as you mentioned. I think that the people on the show, especially Jamie and Adam had run their course. I’m hoping that a new show can revive that, but that’s yet to be seen and I was a bit disappointed in this first episode and really dislike this sort of format. I’d rather they just pick people instead of this competition thing which I rather dislike for this sort of thing.
Another factor against the new show is the assistance the originals received from numerous govt agencies and experts in the required field that were needed to complete the myth.
That kind of goodwill took a few years to build and I doubt it will be there for the new show.
You jest I’m sure, but they could find someone bringing down a building somewhere in, say, the 10-20 story range to do a full scale test. I was also thinking of stuff like ‘you have to melt the steel for it to fail’ or the ‘perfect’ hole the plane made at the Pentagon (supposedly indicating it had to be a cruise missile or alien sub sandwich or something). There are tons of myths that could be tested on this…hell, you could probably do a full season with just these myths (I realize that Popular Science and several others have already done a lot of this, but would still be fun and educational for the folks who haven’t seen it or read their articles).