Jay Leno has finally hit the big time. :wink: His wonderful web series has become a TV series, available on CNBC. Last night was the first episode. Anybody else catch it? In these days of really crappy automotive 'reality' shows made for TV, it was refreshing to watch a show that is actually about interesting vehicles and not about the highly manufactured drama of having to hurry get the car ready before some stupid deadline or a bunch of fake arguments between slimy over-acting characters. Other than Wheeler Dealers (which I love), nearly 100% of the "reality" car shows really stink. Do you hear me Velocity channel? It was much nicer watching a real car guy share some interesting car stuff with the audience. I enjoyed the first episode, and it has much better production values that Jay's web series, but that's to be expected since it is now chock full of commercials. Thank goodness for DVRs. The 1st episode sure covered a lot of ground with many different subjects, and the pace was fast. I enjoyed it. What I didn't like were the graphics that popped up on the bottom of the screen explaining simple stuff (e.g. what 'normally aspirated' meant, or info about the home city of Brembo brakes). I guess the producers think the graphics will help automotive neophytes learn about car stuff, but geez, everybody already has Google if they want to learn about something - it's simple enough for them to do. I felt like they graphics were dumbing things down. I'd give it a solid B. Looking forward to next week's show.
I like Jay and have watched his web series for years, and I appreciate that he drives his cars..... But for his new show, I give it a solid Meh...........way too many commercials and they seemed to repeat half of what they showed before the commercial when they came back. I guess they think the short attention span crowd will forget what they just saw and be lost after the commercials? Maybe so, considering how long the commercials went on between takes..... I hope it gets better, but I doubt there will ever be fewer commercials. Time to set the DVR.....
Yeah, it was necessary to not only blast through the commercials, but also through the first 20-30 seconds of when the show came back on due to the unnecessary "recaps" of what was happening right before the commercials. The producers do know that most of us have DVRs and just saw that 10 seconds ago in real time before we blasted through all the commercials, right? I will watch absolutely nothing on live commercial TV. If it is 8pm and a show I want to see happens to be just starting live at this time, I will record it. Then I will do something else for 20 minutes and at 8:20pm I will start watching the recording (still in progress) from the beginning. By 9pm, I've watched the 40 minutes of actual show content without seeing any commercials, and I end up finishing it the same time as people who watched it live and sat through the commercials.
So if you watched the first episode you saw Jay encounter and drive a secret GM concept car - basically a stylized mid-70s Firebird with a honking Ferrari V12 engine from a Daytona dropped in. Here's the complete opposite. [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o4ZEc5AtOo&feature=player_embedded"]Joe's Chevy-Powered 1963 Ferrari Hot Rod - YouTube[/ame]
yeah....i only saw about 15 minutes....the part with them smoking the tires of two similar cars and then getting hauled away by the fake cops...kind of...er...uninspired to say the least. But if you guys say it was a "B" maybe I'll have to find it again...maybe I was just watching a boring part... I was surprised too see it on CNBC....then again, why not...CNN has FOOD shows....
I watched the first show and between pass or fail I give it a fail. Hoping the producers are getting the word and can make a few corrections I'll watch again to see what happens.
Echo the above. Like Jay's enthusiasm but lost interest after about 20 minutes. He either has to match the entertainment/clownerie of the ex-Top Gear crew, or the genuine enthusiasm of Chris Harris and some of the other iDrive folks.
I wonder how much of the first show was suffering from being a pilot episode (my assumption). Looks like they packed a little bit of everything in there (there were a lot of different segments going on) so as to try to demonstrate what they were capable of? I guess we'll see what Episode 2 looks like and get a better idea. It's not fair to compare Leno's new show to Top Gear, but if you've ever seen any of the earlier shows of the Clarkson/Hammond/May era of TG, you'll recognize they were not nearly as good what the show eventually grew to become, and what many of us are hoping the Amazon Prime version of NTG (not Top Gear) will be.
I'm hoping some one will post a link here that will let me watch the new TG, cause I'm not paying to watch it.......any more than I already do with $150/mo internet/TV bill...... I'm willing to give it another shot, as long as I remember to record it. One thing I like about his Web shows is that they focus on just one car at a time.
The second episode was last night. I was a bit disappointed in it. The show needs to have far less of Jay trying to be "on" and mugging in front of the camera and instead be much more low key. It seems like they are trying too hard to "produce" segments. And it shows. (e.g. acting as the orchestra conductor in front of revving engines, the over-acted lowriders bit) And the whole car value segment with the over the top opera-signing appraiser. Geez. But they don't need to do that. Jay is good when he is himself as a car enthusiast and he just talks cars with people The segment on the Peterson Museum vault was good. And I did like the Ridge Road story and history lesson. So, overall I think the show is on the right track. They just need to tone it down a bit. I wouldn't mind if the various segments were longer and more in depth, resulting in fewer subjects each episode.
I've yet to watch it and probably won't based on what I'm hearing here. I would like to see more shows/documentaries like Idris Elba's King of Speed or the Eric Bena's Love The Beast. Even making the Petrolicious videos into a 30 minute show would be better than what is on TV now IMHO.