I’ve been watching Amazon’s new “totally not Top Gear, oh wait it is really and we’re not even trying to hide it” show The Grand Tour recently. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes and it’s been a lot of fun.
The show follows Top Gear’s format pretty closely, usually featuring a single longer film split into two or more chunks over the course of the episode, punctuated by shorter regular features that are usually played more for laughs than anything. The longer film tends to offer a blend between Clarkson, May and Hammond’s usual silly activities and some thoughts on their cars of the week, deflecting the common criticisms of Top Gear’s latter years in which people accused it of not really being a car show any more.
The longer features have been enjoyably varied so far. One week featured a hilarious sequence of Clarkson, May and Hammond attempting to complete a military exercise — in this case, the “car of the week” was used to assist them in their getaway from an eventually successful rescue mission — while another featured an attempt to recreate the “Grand Tour” of years gone by, whereby wealthy young gentlemen would travel around continental Europe in an attempt to learn more about culture and the arts. (The latter was enjoyably undermined by Hammond turning up in a noisy Dodge and repeatedly doing donuts at every opportunity while Clarkson and May drove an Aston Martin and a Rolls-Royce in an attempt to be more “refined” respectively.)
The shorter features are a little hit and miss. “Conversation Street” — essentially a part of the show where the three talk in a rather unstructured manner similar to the “news” section of Top Gear — tends to work well, as the group has great chemistry as always, and plenty to talk about. “Celebrity Braincrash”, meanwhile, ostensibly a segment where they invite a celebrity on to participate in a difficult quiz, but where the celebrities in question inevitably die in some comedically ridiculous manner on their way to the tent that plays host to the show, is a gag that kind of ran its course in the first show and would have probably been better served being replaced by something new in subsequent episodes.
Likewise, the show’s replacement for the Top Gear test track is a cool course with some entertaining gimmicks, but “The American”, the show’s Stig-equivalent, isn’t a patch on the understated, mute hilarity of Top Gear’s anonymous driver. Like Celebrity Braincrash, “The American” is a bit of a one-note joke, though thankfully in this case not one that is repeated in every episode.
Despite its flaws, however, I’ve been enjoying The Grand Tour, and it’s proven to be an enjoyable successor to Top Gear. I watched a few episodes of the new Top Gear with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc and didn’t hate it, though it wasn’t the same at all; the chemistry and sense of genuine friendship that Clarkson, May and Hammond had built up over the years simply wasn’t there with the new cast. Fortunately, with the existence of The Grand Tour, this is no longer an issue, since those who enjoyed Top Gear’s old way of doing things can now simply get more of the same.
Some might call that unimaginative. I would call it eminently sensible on Amazon’s part, and great for the people who just wanted more of the show they enjoyed without radical changes.