After watching the new Top Gear America episodes I found the show much improved from last season. I Also found the new Car Show interesting.
Thoughts and opinions of either show.
TG USA is better this season that it was last season. Last season some of the challenges were more or less carbon copies of what TG UK did 7 seasons ago. TG USA really hit on something with the “Cheap pickup truck in Alaska” show. They did something that the UK show hadn’t done previously, and they are carrying that on this season.
Also they are straying from the traditional Top Gear format :
- Test supercar and/or part 1 of the challenge of the week
- The News
- Short road test segment
- Star In A Reasonably Priced Car
- Part 2 of challenge/short road test segment
I suspect the reason for this is that TG UK runs 60+ minutes uninterrupted and on US TV you get about 43 minutes of program and 17 minutes of commercials. So they can’t fit everything the original show has every week due to time constraints. They did attempt to do everything the UK show did for the first two or three episodes of TG USA, but it was terrible, The News segment lasted all of 2 minutes, and the Big Star Small Car segment was about 3 minutes. Fortunately they’ve gotten away from that this season.
With that said. I think the first season of The Car Show is better than the first season of TG USA. The hosts seem to have a better rapport with each other, and the show is paced much better IMHO.
Liked the first episode of season 2 of TG:USA. This is the format they need to keep up to be more relevant to the US.
The Car show seems to be trying to be like TG right now with some of their segments. Why should we care how a Rolls Royce drives? None of their target audience can afford it(neither can TG’s audience for that matter), so they should try doing cheaper vehicles instead. Though something tells me John Sally wouldn’t know what to do with a Camry or Accord priced vehicle. The stick shift learning segment was pretty good though.
Why is John Sally on there anyways? He doesn’t seem to contribute to the show much, except what it’s like to OWN a Rolls Royce maybe.