Broken shifter? Top Gear’s new season fails to wow

Forget the main event, stick to the Web-only Extra Gear.
Top Gear, one of the BBC's most successful shows, returned on Sunday night with a new cast—and very few fresh ideas. Ratings in the UK missed the 5 million mark that host Chris Evans set as a measure for success, and the best parts were relegated to the Web-only Extra Gear, starring Rory Reid and Chris Harris. The debut could prove troublesome for a BBC that needs strong foreign sales of the show to fill its coffers in times of ever-decreasing government support.

The show, which premiered Monday night on BBC America and Sunday night on BBC Two in the UK, is the third iteration of Top Gear since 1977. The original format wasn't particularly good, but it did well because the UK had only a handful of TV channels to watch at the time. 2002 brought the Andy Wilman-produced reboot, starring Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond. Under their tenure, the show didn't just succeed with UK audiences—it built up a global cult following with fans either watching it on local broadcasters or more commonly via Internet piracy.

But last year, Top Gear's machinery ground to a halt after the show's frontman berated and then attacked a producer during a toddler-like tantrum (if toddlers punched people and called them c*nts). The latest of an increasingly long list of Clarksonian scandals was too much for the state-funded BBC to endure, and the grand oaf of television was fired. With the frontman gone, Wilman, May, and Hammond threw in the towel as well, but things ended well for the gang. They landed a multimillion dollar contract with Amazon to make a new series called The Grand Tour, which debuts later this year.

Meanwhile, the intellectual property—including the tame racing driver the Stig—remained with the BBC. And the show has been such a money-spinner that it would have been inconceivable for the channel's executives to let it die. After searching high and low for a new host, the BBC decided on Chris Evans, an extremely successful light entertainment broadcaster and radio DJ in the UK, along with co-host Matt LeBlanc, adding some international star power and an American accent to aid global appeal.

Unfortunately, the show didn't change much else. Truth be told, Top Gear had been getting a little stale over the last few years, and this could have been the perfect time to flush that transmission and reconfigure it. (Maybe add a dual clutch or some flappy paddles?) All we got was a bigger studio, a new car, and a rallycross track for the "star in a reasonably priced car" segment—and an online-only supplement called Extra Gear that managed to have more charm and chemistry than the main event. As a long-time Top Gear watcher, I found Sunday's show just plain boring, and the response on Twitter and Facebook shows that I'm not alone. Even the studio audience looked underwhelmed.

To be fair, the 2002 reboot also took some time before chemistry among the presenters bedded in properly, and it's not like Evans and crew weren't under a lot of pressure. In the run-up to the season opener, there were increasingly pessimistic reports in British newspapers reporting problems with the production. Maybe that lack of pressure was part of Extra Gear succeeding where Top Gear didn't? We may never know, but Reid and Harris were far more engaging.

If we could give the BBC some advice, perhaps it's time think outside the (gear) box.