Yep. The Science Channel/Discovery is going there.
Revive the series by choosing a new host/hosts with a weekly elimination reality show.
sob
I wonder if it’ll be like the show Discovery did a few years ago called The Big Brain Theory. They had a bunch of engineer/maker types; each episode they split into two teams and had to build some complicated apparatus on a very short schedule. It wasn’t as good as it should have been.
I met one of the contestants on that show, and I heard he moved to San Fran. Don’t know if his screen presence would work in the Mythbusting format, but in terms of skills he’d be a natural.
I hate reality competition shows, especially the elimination ones. They’re so formulaic. Mythbusters worked, in part, because Jamie and Adam were just two smart guys who knew what they were doing and could build stuff. Plus they had chemistry; Jamie was the sober, serious one while Adam was more fun-loving.
You know, I always thought it would have been a good episode of The Big Bang Theory if Adam or Jaime appeared asking some of the guys to consult on some bustworthy myth.
The show had already run out of myths and the producers consistently decided that viewers would rather see more myths tested than show more information about building things or a devote more film+production time to better science, which just meant they went through all the myths faster than needed and did most of them poorly.
I could see a show that went back and did everything again, properly, while still keeping it fun and explodey. But based on the methodology they’re following to find new hosts, I’m finding it highly unlikely that they’ll do what they should do. Even if they find some people who are decent at building things and are fun to watch, that still just puts us back where the show was when it stopped - which is well past the jumped-the-shark stage and the producers still doing it wrong.
Granted, every time you start a new show, it’s a chance to do something different and see if the magic ingredients happen to have combined, but I’m pretty doubtful. I’ll wait to hear something good about any new show before checking it out.
There’s been several shows that tried to copy mythbusters. One I recall used a high speed camera to show everyday objects exploding. like popcorn, or bursting a balloon. It didn’t last long.
There was one where Adam and Jamie set up the build challenge. Same deal. It was gone after a season. I lost track of the other failed shows.
Tory, Grant, and Kari seem like the best choice for a reboot. But they don’t have the charisma of Jamie and Adam. They did a good job building stuff and testing myths. But something seemed a bit flat. Just not as intense as the main guys.
Hard to imagine two unknowns filling those pocket protectors. But we’ll see how it works out.
Time Warp. 3 seasons.
Outrageous Acts of Science is an excellent show that focuses on internet videos and then explaining the science behind the clip.
Either they, or the production team they had, was less interested in science. You always knew that it was going to be a bad Build Team episode when the very first thing they said was, “Hey, let’s just try it out full-size!” Only Grant had a technological/physics/mechanical knowledge, so he didn’t have a good foil to push him to do more.
They were in too much of a hurry to figure out how to solve problems with their full-scale tests that they rarely accomplished much beyond replicating the original circumstances of the myth, let alone replicating the results. Even Adam and Jamie, as time went on, stopped bothering to replicate the results properly.
I think their production schedule was insufficient for many tasks and, for both teams, the majority of the work fell on Adam (due to Jamie’s disinterest) and Grant (due to the other’s inability), which limited what they could accomplish. Back when Adam and Jamie were both contributing, they could do some cool work so their team could do a lot cooler things (until Jamie started to drop out). But the Build Team was always just limited to Grant.
A Grant/Adam show would probably be cool at building tons of elaborate lab-room test rigs, but less good out in the field with big builds. I’m not sure how well they’d work together without someone managing. Adam probably isn’t great at coordinating work and Grant would end up bowing to Adam’s experience/age. And neither of them would be very good at managing a big build out in the middle of nowhere, making sure that everything came together correctly and safely (see the boat bifurcation episode, where the build team dropped the boat on one of their trucks).
Jamie might not be the best roboticist or electrical engineer, but - besides being great at elegant design - he had management abilities and could keep the big picture in sight. The big spectacle myths were almost certainly thanks to his having a full crew of workers, a fully stocked build location, and his ability to oversee everything. If you rely on film producers for that, you’re going to run into management issues and safety issues. The Build Team could never have done the huge water slide, for example.
And none of that is the sort of thing that the show will probably test for. They’ll end up with a bunch of Adams, and end up setting up a small workshop in a garage for them to work out of. They’ll never be able to do the big builds that require a big crew and a big vision, with proper engineering.
What I hate are the “reality” shows based on contrived competitions and eliminations.
I’m not going to watch any new iteration of MB if this is how they’re choosing the presenters.
I was always a bigger fan of the build-y bits than the scientce-y bits, because none of those guys were scientists so their methodologies were always wonky. So now I get my fix on Tested (or more specifically, the Tested Youtube channel).
I thought the show with the two other guys who built stuff was a Mythbusters replacement. I don’t remember their names or the name of the show. One guy was a handsome self-proclaimed scientist and the other was an expert at blowing things up. One thing they did was the lawn chair/weather balloon thingy. Another was a giant rolling tire.
The problem with that show was the relationship between the two. They tried to duplicate the broship of the Mythbusters and it just looked fake. Does anyone remember this show?
Yeup, that was it, running coach. The good looking scientist still does promos for the Science Channel but I haven’t seen the show in some time.
Actually, he’s not the scientist. It was the other guy.
You are correct. Does science make you grow muttonchops?
Too bad we don’t have Mythbusters to find out. 
Disagree. I’ve always found Kari to be pretty damn charismatic.
I was a big fan of Mythbusters, but by the time it ended I was really ready to let it go. I just can’t get excited about a new version.
Agreed. In this general vein of show, I’d be much more interested in seeing a revival of Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars.
I find it hard to imagine what new myths could be tested. The Mythbusters used up every idea they could dream up, urban legends, movie stunts, explosions. Some of their old episodes had some pretty silly myths to test.