This show was setup to look great, it had all the makings of a great show. a great cast, great premise and its on Netflix, a great media outlet!
Somehow it came out sub par. And i was very disappointed by this. The show is clearly not myth-busters 2.0 something most fans were in many ways expecting. Yes you will always get your haters when the sequel isn't as good as the original, but lets face it nothing is. This show simply needed better marketing to make it clear it is NOT in anyway like myth-busters. The science of the show is limited and far between, where as the show focuses on stories (not myths!) from history about a certain subject each episode. The weak glue holding together the reason for the show is to analyze 6 (random number??) events in history that involved the shows theme that episode. This sounded great in the trailers!
What you actually get however is stories. Long drawn out, poorly told stories often acted out in scene that's cheesy, dull and often filled with casual racism.
Don't get me wrong, some of the stories are quite interesting, but how they are told to you via the build team is just upsetting and corny.
For people we know are naturally funny, intelligent and interesting at telling the "myths", they somehow manage to make every serious real life event seem like a sitcom, constantly waiting for a punchline that never arrives. It hurt my eyes and ears to see the heist in which some old British men bust into a vault. What passes for 'humour' in the states clearly likely just enrages any real British folk with their appalling clichés.
What happened guys? I don't want to rag on you and the producers, but this show really needs a spit shine to pull out those good moments and great ideas, and really bring this up to par for a 2016 production.
We often barely see the build team, you know, building. They are often confined to god awful acting and cartoon like realities to tell a tale. Some of the really interesting stories have clearly been well researched and really grasp you and pull you "down the rabbit hole" you want to know more, you want to see the theory tested.. but then it ends, like sex without an orgasm. Abruptly cutting to a "hey that was a story you liked now lets rate it" pointless arbitrary system in which they give numbers to randomly picked features of the event etc.
WHY? Why 6? Why rate out of 10? Why place in some weakly held together ranking system, which isn't a surprise if you can do basic maths throughout the show, because that makes it science?
I'm open to the idea of trying something new, and I don't want to sound negative to the whole show, it's just hard not to when what limited hype for a show crushes your hopes when the final product arrives. Please just clean and buff the wheel, don't try reshape it.
I'll say now in a spoiler free way, the episode on con artists.. just skip it. It's dull, tedious and has 0 science in the entire episode, it's just storytelling done bad. All the facts in this episode can be found in a 10 second Google search. Sadly reading Wikipedia will likely be more entertaining.
Well I guess if this show is set for a season 2 it really needs to pick up it's game. Look how well grand tour did, just because its got the big 3 doing what we all know and love them doing. We liked myth-busters because science is fascinating, terrifying, fun, and also something we can see & prove in real life. We loved the build team for their natural reactions to things (censored though they often were), their quirky humor, and their mistakes which made them human and relate-able. We'd love to see more of them, and less of Hollywood please.
Will I return down the rabbit hole like Alice? Only after I've fallen asleep...
