My impressions:
What I liked:
- The season montage looks like we're in for quite a thrilling ride, and dare I say it looks like perhaps one of the most diverse season montages we've ever got from the trio.
- I like the tent a LOT. The windows seem like such a great idea for the nature of the show as well. The interior's design feels very cozy as well, from the diamond shaped platform to all the wood to the table setup and decorations. Super excited to see the backdrops over the course of the season.
- Cinematography is as good as it's ever been. This was most noticeable in the Holy Trinity segment.
- Speaking of that, the entire Holy Trinity segment was fantastic. This is what Top Gear is and what Top Gear is all about, and just makes the gulf between this and the poor replacement of Top Gear that much wider.
- The Volkswagen joke omg
- I'm glad that they have a new track, but I think it's way too early to comment on how good it is for testing cars (RE: variety of turns), but we've been used to the Top Gear test track so long that I think, over time, it will build memories, corners will get names based on those memories, and we'll all get used to it. The scenery is also a marked improvement, but I hope it gets a better name in future episodes.
- The M2 test was just a good, solid segment. Nothing exceptional, but I didn't expect much since they were just trying to show off the track.
- The banter and chemistry is seriously untouched from when they left Top Gear. This is the most important thing the show needed to get right and it did.
What I don't know about yet:
- I'm somewhere between appreciating and not liking the intro. The bits with Jeremy leaving the BBC were all fine, but I'm not too hot on the Mad Max tribute. As soon as they all got into different Mustangs it felt a bit.. odd.. and forced (even though, I get it, the bill is being footed by Americans now and we should celebrate, but even the planes felt over the top). Not only was it a bit overindulgent in tone (might be due to musical choice), but I got a feeling that even more attention should have been paid to more of the cars there. Upon rewatching it, I can spot a lot more cars I didn't see the first time around, but still, there was an
even greater variety of cars that were present there that didn't get their spot to shine. Just weird to me that you could have the newest Ford GT there and it not getting a spotlight. I guess that also might be the point, but it felt like it could have been shot/edited better to some degree.
- The jokes about leaving the BBC or the way they said things to allude to Top Gear were pretty hit-or-miss, and there were a lot of them peppered throughout.
- Celebrity guest segment was hysterical, but I'm wondering what it will actually be like in future episodes, and we didn't get a good sense of that quite yet.
What I didn't like:
- There were a few times the humour didn't go over so well, like the drone being shot and the edited fight over who has the best air force. Bit goofy at times, and I hope it's just them shaking off the dust and it's not going to get slapstick or anything.
- I get that Ferrari have been super stingy for a while now with lending out and allowing time trials of their hypercars and they riffed off of that for the entire episode, but I feel like they should have at least known or disclosed that
some LaFerraris can be driven only on electric power.
- The American doesn't really have the personality of The Stig, and his lines were kind of cheesy in a not-good way. Hopefully he gets better as the series goes on, probably the weakest part of the episode next to the fight about the air force.
My takeaways:
- Fantastic start to what looks to be a promising series, and one that I can comfortably know I don't need to supplement with the husk that is the current Top Gear to get my Top Gear fix. So much time and effort was put into setting up the show, explaining all of the new segments and making references to the BBC split in this debut episode that it's understandable why perhaps it wasn't the most focused thing, but all of that is necessary and I think the trio will get more comfortable as the series goes on. The chemistry is there. The cars are there. The boys are back.
