Sonsabitches. This is too much—in fact, it was enough to get me off my butt and write an emergency mid-month entry on this blog. Usually I agonize over what to write about and have to open a vein to come up with a topic once a month, but this one damn near wrote itself.
As all three of my regular blog readers know (hi mom!—oh wait, my mom doesn’t have a computer)…as all two of my regular blog readers know, I have written about Top Gear fairly frequently, here and here. This is not a Top Gear blog—although, judging by all those entries, it sure looks like it—but if the TG wonks keep up this nonsense, it might turn into one.
What am I on about? Why, the recent news that the ill-fated American version of Top Gear, the concept of which has been kicked around for…what is it, years now?…has reared its ugly head again. Just yesterday it was announced all over the intertubes that the History Channel (what?) is going to pick up the show and air at least 10 episodes this fall.
All I have to say is…is TG staffed by raving lunatics? Is the BBC office filled with lead paint fumes? Who in the world needs an American version of Top Gear?
Damn, this thing is worse than a horror movie villain—you just can’t kill it. Not that we haven’t tried. We don’t want it to live, and we keep smacking it down, only to see it return again and again, as unwelcome as the unbathed, greasy-haired, sweaty guy launching himself into the middle of a crowded dance floor, rubbing up against all the normal people trying to enjoy themselves.
You’d think the Top Gear head honchos would have learned, what with their debacle known as Top Gear Australia. I’ve never seen it, but judging by the comments in TG fan forums, it’s the awkward shirt-tail relative with bad manners that nobody wants to acknowledge is part of the family. In fact, just recently, to give the show more cache, they crammed one of the TG Australia hosts onstage with Jeremy Clarkson and James May when the pair went Down Under with the Top Gear Live show. “Look!” they seemed to say. “This guy is a Top Gear host too!”
Riiiight. Nice try, thanks for playing, here’s your Rice-a-Roni. Now get out of the way and let the proper TG guys do their thing.
See, that’s the problem. And it’s something that the money-grubbers at the top of the franchise don’t understand. The Top Gear concept is not the star. An hour about cars and weird stunts is not the reason millions of people worldwide are crazy about the original TG, and merely recreating it with country-specific accents will not capture the lightning in the bottle that is the original TG. What they don’t understand is that millions of people worldwide don’t tune in to watch a show about cars; millions of people worldwide tune in to watch the three original eedjits do weird things with cars.
Got that? It’s not the cars. It’s not the accents. It’s the three eedjits.
Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond are Top Gear. It’s their chemistry, their dynamic, their intelligence severely compromised by their eccentricities, the illusion of their sheer…Britishness, for lack of a better word, smashed all to bits as they bicker with one another, crash their cars, and get all petulant about the oddest things. Yes, that “British propriety” thing is a stereotype—we all know that—but we still enjoy it when the mask of dignity is whisked off to reveal the massive amount of crazy behind it. In essence, just as we never tire of John Cleese’s silly walks, we never tire of Clarkson, May, and Hammond hitting things with hammers inappropriately, inexpertly “fixing up” their vehicles, and screaming with the perfect mix of euphoria, adrenalin, and terror as they roar around a track or down a winding road in a supercar that, let’s face it, they’d never be allowed to look at, let alone touch, if they hadn’t fallen into their jobs by some strange twists of fate.
Americans doing the same thing? Feh! Big deal. There’s no cleverness in that. There’s no hidden wackiness to be revealed, no mask of propriety to be stripped away. With Americans, what you see is what you get, so only doing more of that, except behind a wheel, is anticlimactic.
Oh—and stupid. Let’s not forget that.
Let us also not forget that for every All in the Family (Till Death Do Us Part), for every The Office, there has been a Coupling (ironically based on the British version of Friends). There has been a Payne (Fawlty Towers). There has been a Life on Mars, a Men Behaving Badly, a (shudder) Doctor Who, a Red Dwarf. Of course, I also hear they’re planning American travesties of Torchwood and Skins, so apparently the idiocy persists.
So let’s review: Recreating TV shows with the native accent of the target country does not guarantee success. Obviously. So how come the BBC suits, allegedly intelligent creatures, don’t get what we in the trenches know all too well?
Here’s an idea—maybe those allegedly intelligent BBC suits should spend more time giving us the original Top Gear in its proper format—uncut (eliminating the Cool Wall and the News segment in order to fit countless American commercials? bastards!) and closer to the original air date, not a year afterward, on a network besides BBC America, which most Americans don’t even get in their cable or satellite package?
Try that, TG wonks, and then get back to us. Just stop pandering to us with cut-rate versions of decent TV and expect us to lap it up. We’re not that desperate.
We have bittorrents, and we know how to use them.
Good rant
However, I may have to come to the “defense” of the BBC Suits. It’s not that they don’t understand; they understand all too well. They know the markets of the other English-speaking countries and their audiences. I can’t speak for Australia or even New Zealand audiences, but I can for those in the US. To be blunt, US Americans are, in a word, stupid. The kind of stuff that passes for “quality” entertainment on primetime is not as creative as many would like to think. And as much as many Americans like British accents, such people are never the main character. Of course, you have to market to the lowest common denominator and those markets don’t actually like British accents; they complain that they can’t understand them without subtitles. Personally, the only accents of the British Isles that I have trouble with are those of the Welsh, and no one understands them!
That same lowest level of the American audience also has not been exposed to much in the way of British TV. I know too many people that truly do not like British humor, can’t stand Monty Python, and wouldn’t know even one of the handful of great British actors I know. (Kenneth Branagh anyone?) What’s worse is that they have plenty of opportunity to be exposed to such shows and actors, yet how many fellow Americans do you know that ever watch PBS? Hell, even I don’t watch it much any more, but do still appreciate that it’s there and will be whenever I want to watch something intelligent. Ask any American about Bill Moyers and be prepared for the blank stare. Hell, even ask them about the late William Buckley and expect as blank a stare, even from the “conservatives”.
Americans don’t want their lack of education to be challenged by a television show. The British people are highly educated and actually laud those with higher education. Here, thanks to decades of attacks by the conservatives, the educated are considered villains. No one wants to watch someone smarter than them, and the British always come across as smarter, whether they truly are so or not. Maybe it’s that accent again
The Stupid will watch an American version of Top Gear not just because they don’t know any better, but they also don’t want to know. I’m sure you’ve met people you would happily call “willfully ignorant” and if you did, they would actually thank you for the compliment :p
The American version of The Office probably has done well because of this tenet of the American viewer. They can’t stand the British version because “it’s too dry, can’t understand them, it’s not funny, can’t relate, et cetera.” Americans doing exactly the same thing in America are suddenly “Awesome! Funny! I work with a guy just like that!” and so on.
I don’t know if you’ve been watching the show on ABC, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution”, but I’ve seen some of the comments on the hulu site where people complain about his colloquialisms, like calling the cooks “lunch ladies” “darlin’” and so on, acting like because he’s in America, he should change how he talks. Some people are quite offended with his manner of speech, as if he actively trying to be insulting. More Stupid Americans.
The BBC Suits know what they’re doing, but I think, too, that they still don’t quite understand the US-American demographic as much as they think. Interestingly, I recently watched that episode of TG with Jeremy and James having to make a VW commercial (yes, I know I can probably torrent the show, but I’m lazy and my torrent program likes to bog down the computer and connection every time I use it; I like my fast connection minus the torrent-dam.) The interesting part is not how badly they did in their attempt, but that I paid attention to a VW ad for their newest unpronounceable model, and I wondered if they had hired Jeremy to create it. The British admen likely knew British expectations for advertising on TV, but they also likely had no idea of how to advertise on US television. If Jeremy and James had been working with an American ad agency for VW, their attempts would have worked. Lowest Common Denominator (LCD.)
Oh, one last thing (maybe): I don’t agree that Coupling is just a British version of Friends. Coupling has only one topic: sex. That’s all it’s ever about, thus the name. Friends jumps all over the place, though sex figures strongly in the main plot. I’d say Seinfeld is a closer cousin to Coupling, than Friends
Now, Graham Norton on the latenight circuit here would be a hoot, but we know how well that would go over with the LCD and puritans…
Australia, Russia, US… what else?
Only James, Richard and Jeremy ever!