Cutting the Crap: The Grand Tour Loses Dead Weight Segments for Season Two

I’ve said before that automotive television is frequently terrible. Cars don’t have a lot of on-screen charisma without someone inside them, meaning most automotive presenters are forced into awkward acting attempts to “add drama,” despite not being actors.

The exception are shows that don’t rely on gimmicks and allow endearing hosts to be themselves. Top Gear has been a prime example of this since the mid-2000s, improved further by having presenters that act believably in unbelievable ways.

However, when the team that originally made it great left to create The Grand Tour, it wandered dangerously close to becoming an unintentional parody of the old show. Thankfully, most of the past month has been littered with news proving they’re shying away from hokey antics for more substantive programming.

Granted, much of what Amazon’s The Grand Tour did with the first season served to intentionally distance itself from the BBC show that Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May recently abandoned — or were fired from, in Clarkson’s case. Bringing on high-profile celebrity guests was a staple on Top Gear, as was the Stig’s hot laps around the show’s famous test track. Despite having Andy Wilman — the man who helped come up with those concepts — as the producer on Tour, the program didn’t want to run into any unnecessary legal trouble with British Broadcasting.

The final result was the implementation of things like Celebrity Brain Crash, a segment where a celebrity guest is killed in some elaborate manner before being able to come on the show, and stock car driver Mike Skinner as the boorish American (aimed at replacing the mythical and silent Stig).

Skinner announced he was out of the show earlier this month — saying his character was out for the show’s second season and wishing the team luck. “My character wasn’t developed as I was told,” he explained via Twitter.

That’s understandable. Nothing against Mike, but the writers pigeonholed him into a difficult position with nowhere to go. “The American” was about as one-dimensional as a character could be and didn’t play particularly well in the United States, for reasons that should be blindingly obvious. However, his isn’t the only reoccurring segment on the chopping block.

Youtube notified me that The Grand Tour had posted another video this morning and, while watching it with my coffee, Clarkson had a fake phone call with producers telling him to get rid of Celebrity Brain Crash. Apparently aware that the bit felt forced, it’s also being removed for something that looks to be far more satisfying — famous people attempting to drive a cut-in-half Alfa Romeo.

I have no doubt that the production team at Tour read every single comment made about the first season and took notes. The online consensus was that both the American and Brain Crash were cringe-worthy portions of the program. While I wasn’t quite so down on either, I felt they’d have been a fantastic way to poke fun at Top Gear for episode one — then disappear for subsequent ventures.

May, Hammond, and Clarkson are already thoroughly prepared to engage in clownish antics and do best as fish out out water. That’s what makes the pre-recorded segments so much better than the live bits. The trio is just allowed to go mental in an uncontrolled environment, with occasionally contrived jokes that were clearly written weeks prior and don’t always work. We know they’re better than that because we’ve seen it with our own eyes before.

There’s also nothing particularly funny about tossing in more zany characters when the core group has that pretty well covered — and killing an A-list celebrity loses its impact when you’ve seen it happen four times already. Frankly, I’m glad to see those segments go out window. While it faltered a bit in its first season, The Grand Tour is enjoyable car-centric television and will only be made better by trimming the fat.

[Image: Amazon]