Just stop. Now.
God, I hate Jay Leno. Everything he touches turns to watered-down, inoffensive-to-all mush. My latest peeve? For his new show, he stole the “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car” segment from the BBC’s “Top Gear” and completely, embarrassingly sucked all traces of fun from it.
A little back story: “Top Gear” is a fantastically entertaining British show about cars, especially high-performance cars. They do test drives, have wacky races and feature the popular weekly segment “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car,” where a celebrity takes a regular compact car (picture the equivalent of a Dodge Neon) for a high-speed spin around a nearly 2-mile test track. It’s awesome. There’s serious competition to score a respectable time, so the celebs put the pedal to the metal as they tear around the track, roar down straightaways and weave through the wonderfully named turns (like Hammerhead, Chicago, and Gambon, named for actor Michael Gambon, who took the turn too fast one episode and almost flipped his car). It’s great fun.
Now switch over to Leno. Last night, he had sportscasters Bob Costas and Al Michaels compete in his “Green Car Challenge,” which was adapted from the “Top Gear” concept. (Noted gearhead Leno, by the way, was a guest star on the most recent season of “Top Gear,” and was a key player in last year’s failed effort by NBC to create an American version of “Top Gear.” So you’d think he’d know better.) In his challenge, Leno has celebrities drive an electric Ford Focus (which is painted electric orange, like a clown car) around a ridiculously short (1,100 feet), garishly painted course that looks like a children’s board game. And there are bizarre obstacles, like a cutout of Al Gore, that drivers have to avoid hitting, and ping-pong balls and confetti cannons that spray the car as it toodles past. It’s an absolute mockery, a low-speed circus. Perhaps the worst part is the blaring silence — there’s no rev of the engine, no downshifting, no screech of the tires . . . . it’s an entirely quiet, antiseptic, danger-free, excitement-free zone. Wednesday night’s race was so eerily quiet that Al Michaels had to supply his own driving noises (his “Rrrrrrr-rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” was the best thing about the segment).
It’s shockingly, appallingly bad. How can you screw up something as simple as a race around a track? It baffles me.
Leno’s version is a complete, utter failure in every conceivable way, dumbed-down and boring, an insult to intelligent viewers. The NBC race course, if you can even call it that, lacks one simple, basic thing that’s kinda crucial: Speed. Speed is needed to make a race . . . . oh, what’s that word . . . FUN! Watching a car circle a parking lot at 20 mph? Not fun. Watching a driver barely maintain control as the tires smoke taking a sharp turn at 75 mph? Fun. That sense of breakneck speed is exhilarating and thrilling and, yeah, a little dangerous. And that makes for fun TV.
Compare the two yourself. Here’s a video of Jay previewing his track (try not to fall asleep):
And here’s one of the original:
Case closed. On behalf of the American people, I formally apologize to “Top Gear.”
