Driving Sports

This may come as a surprise, but until just last week, I've managed to avoid having cable television since 1997. That doesn't mean I'm a technophobe, far from it. I had a HD television for several years and, in addition to DVDs and AppleTV, I've been downloading programming off the torrents for as long as I've had broadband (since the Clinton era). For automotive programming my diet has been a steady course of Top Gear and Fifth Gear out of the UK.

This all changed recently, when I upgraded my home to fiber optic (FiOS) and said "what the hell" to the HD TV option. With my new catalog of 1,000 channels and a DVR at my disposal, my first venture was to set the box to record some choice automotive programming. My selections off the bat were a couple shows I had heard of, but had never had the opportunity to watch, "Motorweek" and "Supercars Exposed." After a couple weeks had passed, the DVR had found and recorded a few of each. So tonight, after putting the rest of the family to bed, I sat down with the last slice of Grandma's Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, kicked my feet up and hit play.

It does appear that while I've been downloading Filet Mignon from the UK regularly, the rest of America has been stuck with Big Macs. I hate Big Macs.

I will be the first to admit that the videos we do here at Driving Sports aren't the highest quality productions. Fact is, we have a budget of roughly $0 per episode and you just can't escape a limitation like that when shooting in the field.  And, because we can't really take the time for a proper writing and shooting schedule, each of our episodes is typically conceived, written, shot and cut within 48 hours -- if not quicker. It's just a fact of life that cutting corners like that is going to show up in the final product.

Now, I'm not complaining. We've managed to have our clips viewed more than 2-million times in 2008 alone, and for the most part, we scored reasonably high ratings on services like YouTube, where everyone thinks of themselves as having the production expertise of Mr.Demille and the driving skills of Lewis Hamilton. With critics like that, it's a wonder we've been able to maintain a high average.

So how can dribble like "Supercars Exposed" and "Motorweek" stay on the air? I just can't get my head around it. They have so many problems it's hard it's hard to nail exactly where they fail.

But oh, I'll try.

First off, "Motorweek." For the first season of Driving Sports TV, way back in 2006, I employed a student fresh out of The Art Institute's film program. And, like most kids fresh out of school he insisted on adding useless effects to as many shots as possible. To him making a head float in a wheel was a good idea. Letters smashing through the screen for an A/B, to him was genius -- even if a simple cut would have been more effective. A lot of my time was spent telling him to remove effects. While watching "Motorweek" I couldn't help but wonder if the show was assembled by first year film school interns. Zooms, pans and effects are used and abused in ways I can imagine even most Art Institute students would find gratuitous. Counter to this visual and auditory cacophony is a dry and humorless delivery, sprinkled with more brand placements than a Rocky movie. After a single show I felt both vacant and annoyed.

As a chaser, I loaded up "Supercars Exposed" on the DVR. Now, this show I had high hopes for. The program's host, Tanner Foust, has contributed regularly to one of my print magazines and I've always found him to be an accommodating interviewee, on camera and off. The formula is an easy one for "Supercars Exposed": take amazing cars, put them in the hands of one of the great North American drivers (Foust), and see what happens. The result? The program commits the greatest sin possible: it takes amazing cars and makes them utterly and completely boring. Watching it makes me long for something more stimulating and visually stirring, like C-Span.

"Supercars Exposed," thankfully, isn't long for this world. At least not with Tanner at the helm. He's moving up to the new American production of Top Gear USA, assuming it sees the light of day. The pilot has been shot and it's expected to air on NBC sometime by spring, 2009. This worries me. Not necessarly that Tanner will be one of the co-hosts, or even that I was turned down to be one of the other hosts (a position filled by Eric Stromer from Home Garden TV -- no, I'm not kidding.) My main concern is that given the exceedingly low bar for automotive programming in the US, Top Gear USA won't be even half of what it's UK counterpart is. To be even modestly successful it doesn't have to be. It's not like it's a difficult formula: focus on the cars, use good camera angles and don't bore the audience to tears.

As Jeremy Clarkson said on the first episode of Top Gear UK, "Here, the cars are the stars." I'm not getting the impression that NBC is thinking that way, especially since they cast a guy that said his favorite car is a Toyota Camry Hybrid. Mr. Stromer, you may be a nice guy, but that opinion is all sorts of wrong for you to be hosting a motoring program.

In the end, even with all the nifty FiOS channels in glorious HD, I'm having trouble finding anything worth watching. Sure, the DVR is set to find the next "Victory by Design" episode, but at this point I can't think of anything else worth recording. I've sure as hell canceled "Supercars Exposed" and "Motorweek" from the system.

What do you think? Is the wish for good, solid, big-budget motoring entertainment television too much to ask for here in the good ol' US of A? What do you record on your DVR? Post your thoughts in the comments.