People who know me well know of my great affection for The World's Most Popular TV Show, better known as the lovably geeky joint Top Gear. It's three dudes - wait, this on is the BBC, I should say blokes - who know and love their cars, and proceed to make a hilarious show where they occasionally review a car on its merits and more often do something wacky, like try to build their own electric car or race a supercar against the Eurostar from London to the French Riviera.
The show in its current incarnation [its name is a throwback to a more tepid show from the 80s] started in the early 00s, and I remember getting hooked in an early season along with my college roommate. We watched religiously for the rest of our college careers and beyond as the show grew and grew in fame, audience and budget.
Recently, however, it's beginning to jump the shark. Less car reviews, more crazy stunts. And the villagers are unhappy.
The show's producer admits as much on TG's own blog, in a long entry full of conciliatory points:
You’re watching a show that’s lost its innocence. To explain, let’s go back a bit. When we started in 2002, our goal was to make a decent Top Gear, but then, and most important, organically, things took us by surprise. Nobody knew the onscreen chemistry of the trio would be so good, also, none of us saw coming where we could actually go with the films.
...
It’s fair to say this incarnation of Top Gear is nearer the end than the beginning, and our job is to land this plane with its dignity still intact.
The car blogs and fan sites of the world take that last line to mean that the sky is falling. But Internet Conspiracy Theorists had also suspected that the previous season would be the last on account of its died-and-gone-to-heaven finale:
What's fair to say is that a show "nearer the end than the beginning" in Season 14 will be done sometime before Season 27. But it's accurate to say that the show is on a downhill slope. There will still be fantastic moments, as the producer himself pointed out in his blog post, but this dog is getting old. I foresee this decade's Top Gear coming to a close before Season 18.
All good things must come to an end, and it is a just world that has bestowed upon the car faithful a whopping seven-plus years of the Best Show Ever.
Car fans can also take solace that there's an heir apparent: Jay Leno.
It shouldn't be a surprise, considering the guy retired from The Tonight Show to "spend more time with [his] cars." But what is surprising is just how much content he's cranking out as a car guy. He's got a weekly Web show, Jay Leno's Garage, where he gets some hands-on time with new (and prototype!) cars. His new talk show has a guest lap leaderboard segment, gloriously ripped from those three blokes in the UK. And he's just made an homage to C'était un Rendezvous on the streets of LA.
It's not big-budget or even British. But Leno's got a lot going for him as the next emperor of car-related entertainment. He appeals to the masses, which can only be said for half of Britain in the case of current king Jeremy Clarkson. He's green, which we need from our automotive role models. And his blue-collar, let's-make-this-in-the-garage attitude is at once decidedly low-budget (which makes it a good fit for the Web content that it is) and quintessentially American. He's a great counter-balance to seven years of Clarkson's Thatcher-esque take on things.
NBC looked into making an American Top Gear some years back. Leno likely would have hosted - and he'd have been clamoring for the job, no doubt - but the bean counters shot it down. In response, Leno's been making car content anyway, and he's done it on his own terms. In America, we don't have kings. But if we did, we'd like them to have that quality.