It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
Overall I think they need to work on the studio segments. The outside films were pretty good but the studio parts weren't as good. Whether they will improve over time remains to be seen.
It is a programme I don't like much anyway but they've gone from irritating to boring, David Tennant ( and then the free falling down a hill thing, that was a fun four minutes) being the only thing separating it from just watching traffic on the M5 for an hour. It needs something, and not more jokes about LeBlanc's pronunciation (that got old quick).
Ebay mark7777_1
The earlier observation about Tennant being the life and soul was spot on.
It's not finding it's feet, it's had them lopped off somewhere around the knees and is stumbling into oblivion.
I think it's... fine. It's competent. But I think in terms of the personalities presenting it, the style of delivery, the pacing, even the soundtrack (i'll get back to this one) it's become a bog-standard 2017 TV production which doesn't stand out from your typical lineup of evening telly.
The only thing that's wrong with it is that we get to compare it to the very best of the last ~15 years of Top Gear. And I think the thing that made that show so great at times was firstly that it was fresh (for proof, look at how the ratings were going down over the last few seasons as the format became stale), the presenters obviously had a personal stake in the whole endeavor, and the production team were absolutely fantastic.
Seriously, at its best, the production was the thing that made Top Gear brilliant. The action shots, the choice of when to use slow-mo, blurred speed shots, montages, choice of camera angle, post-effects to enhance the mood of the scene, the voiceovers, and the soundtrack to the features raised the bar and turned it into art. I mention the soundtrack specifically because I think whoever was in charge of that was a genius. When to use a classic piece of '70s rock, or a contemporary dirty electro groove, or that beautiful piece that used Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)"... everything came together to make something greater than the sum of their parts.
And it went on for long enough that fans will have memories associated with it. For me, it'll be the time around 2006/7 when loads of my friends lived in Birmingham in two big rented houses, and I'd drive over there for the weekend and we'd all sit around with beers and put Top Gear on.
The magic was that it all came together, and the show seemed to have a soul - an almost tangible entity in itself
Now, it doesn't. It's the same thing on paper, the same features, the same structure of studio shots, car features, adventures, challenges. But it's like if your favourite band was totally replaced by perfectly competent musicians playing their songs and they went on tour - no matter how much you like the songs, you know it's not the same. So it is with Top Gear. Now it's just a brand name.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
I like Matt LeBlanc's dry delivery, Chris Harris is a great driver and has a cracking way of conveying the joy of driving (although he is being scripted into a bit of an odd position especially during the coaching of the guest) and Rory Reid is definitely coming into his own. I very much enjoyed the Alfa and Supercar sections last night and they were beautifully shot.
I am slightly disappointed that the production team didn't take the chance to reinvent the format a bit more though.