Mark Rober's Revengineers

I'm a big fan of Mark Rober, sure not all of his YouTube videos are great but a large percentage of them are and some of them are downright classics (squirrel obstacle courses, stolen package revenge, Indian scam caller revenge, etc.), and I don't know a ton about him but he does seem like a great guy who truly cares about getting young people to think like scientists and understand the world on a deeper level. Sure he makes money while doing it which another reviewer mentioned (as if that's a bad thing) but it's not like he's mining for Tungsten in a developing nation, he's doing something good, he deserves to make some cash!

Anyway, as for Revengineers, I was excited when I saw this on HBO Max (or whatever they've changed their name to this week). Mark Rober with an HBO budget? Sounds awesome, especially since his revenge videos are often his best.

Well, I watched a couple (the two most interesting sounding) and they were about 10x worse than his most boring YT video. Mark and his diversity crew (which would be cool if they actually hired great people from different backgrounds, but it seems like they were much more interested in checking boxes than anything else, besides Alan). It's clear these people aren't actually doing much and are more so glorified hosts. One of them is "an artist and welder", not sure what that has to do with engineering and science besides her being the "attractive" one.

All of that wouldn't really matter if the show was great though...but it's not, it's terrible!! They take about literally 2 minutes worth of actual content and stretch it to over 20. The production is grating and unwatchable essentially, with loud transitions, quick cutaways and editing, obnoxious graphics, and the dialogue and presentation which comes off completely fake and scripted (when they're, for example, supposed to be discussing someone's innovation or project - just talk about it! Who wants it to seem like the person is hiding their secret invention from Mark?! All of this just done to extend run time).

Just take the bike theft episode. We get 4 different bikes (including Mark's) with fun ways to deter theft. Each scene with the theft and the bike doing something to backfire on the thief takes about 15-20 seconds each. That's it! They only do it to one person each. Only Alan's really works as planned. They don't engage the person who tried to steal it (despite being right there), they don't try to get multiple people, they don't try to make a commentary or discuss one of the many POVs about why this is happening, and worst of all the pranks are just terrible. Other than Alan's (the bike separated into 2) the rest aren't even inconveniences. You steal a bike and the back tire locks...omg how will you recover?! Ofc the person just drops the bike and leaves.

Skip this unless they drastically improve and completely change it for S2.

I like Mark Rober's stuff, even if he does use his popularity and net worth purely to play act at charity-washing - by selecting one (and one only) photogenic sick kid per year with a guaranteed positive outcome and play up how philanthropic he is, making maddening amounts of money for himself in the process.

This show is just like Mark - fake and designed to fleece money from his fans with the pretence of being for the public good. It has all the trappings on mid-2000s science-entertainment cringe TV.

The cast are himself, a token Asian, a token Latina woman, and a token white woman - the Latina wears short skirts and tights and presents herself as a 'coder and hacker' while displaying fake code on her setup of four monitors in a square configuration, pretending it's super secret. Oh, and in addition to being an elite hacker, she's also apparently able to solder, build, and paint.

The welder gets about wearing tight overalls and boiler suits, all designed to show off her 'assets.' They make sure to remind you that she's super flexible by having her put her foot on top of the bench when she's cutting and welding, as well as making sure we see the footage of her acrobatics where she contorts herself into shapes in skimpy outfits.

The Asian 'maker,' (whatever the hell that is) is just there. He exists in the show.

The whole show is centred around getting revenge on people that do things that are minor inconveniences like not putting away shopping trolleys, over-engineering low grade pranks on people that are well and truly in on the gag.

I got one episode in and deleted the rest. Not worth your time or brain cells.

While the show seems to aim for a diverse cast, it unfortunately falls flat when it comes to delivering compelling content. The execution feels like a cringeworthy, low-budget imitation of shows like MythBusters.

Rather than offering engaging, quality material, it comes off as cheap B movie footage pieced together without much thought.

The end result left me regretting the time I invested in watching it and wishing for something more substantive. In summary, the show tries to give off a certain vibe but fails to deliver, making me wish I could get my time back.

In particular, the storytelling lacked depth and originality, making the entire experience even more unsatisfying.

It's like someone used AI to generate Mark's face into this atrocity.

When I saw in a short on Mark Rober's YouTube channel that he had a TV show now, I was intrigued.

Sadly, this is nothing at all like his (fantastic) YouTube videos. It's simply a bad reality pranks show.

They're supposedly trying to teach people a lesson in response to an act of rudeness, but most of the time, the people pranked don't understand, and there's no attempt to explain why they were pranked.

The pranks aren't even very well executed (or that funny); and unlike on YouTube, there's no analysis as to why, or getting into much of the engineering of anything. It's all enormously dumbed down, and interactions among the team feel kinda staged.

It's like it's just some naive attempt to appeal to the unintellectual masses. It's so off-brand, it makes me wonder what involvement Mark actually had in its creation!

Don't waste your time.

Sorry Mark. I don't think this was worth the damage to your brand. I hope they paid you well at least!