I can’t be the only one who saw this. Jaime Heineman and Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame, have a brand new series that is basically a Rube-Goldberg-machine-building-contest.
Cool concept and a fun show. You can see it on Amazon Instant for free at Watch Unchained Reaction Season 1 | Prime Video
Cool concept. But since any one-week builds are by necessity pretty sloppy, the execution is not very exciting… At least for me.
And the judging, of course, is extremely subjective.
I did find it interesting that they avoided the name Rube Goldberg completely. I am just old enough to remember Goldberg’s Sunday comic. This show isn’t as good, but the premiere was interesting.
The first episode was fun, and the premise is interesting. It’s sort of a problem that Adam and Jamie’s involvement is so peripheral. Their opinions are interesting, but the way they work together on projects is a big part of the appeal of MythBusters, and since MythBusters thankfully is not going away, it doesn’t look like Unchained Reaction will have that. I found myself wondering if there will be some kind of end-of-season championship where one team gets to compete against Adam and Jamie and company. I assume they’re not planning to do that, but I think they should. I expect to keep watching the show, but if Adam and Jamie took part in the builds, that would really be appointment TV.
I liked the brothers group that won, can there really be 5 brothers all that good at building and with such manly facial hair? They talked about working extensively in Hollywood, but in my rudimentary Googling, it seems the only thing I could find is that two of them build sets for CupCake Wars.