24% Of You Rate 'New' Top Gear's First Episode As 1/10
When we posted our Top Gear live discussion on Sunday evening, we were taken aback by the scale of the response. So far the thread has clocked over 550 comments, and if you have a look through, there’s a bit of a theme: most of you guys don’t seem at all keen on the revamped show.
Wanting to quantify exactly how CTzens found the first episode of Top Gear with Chris Evans as host, we ran a couple of polls, both of which produced startling results. In the first we asked you to rate the episode out of 10, and an astonishing 24 per cent of you picked ‘1’. In fact, 75 per cent of the 11,000+ people polled gave the episode a score between 1 and 5.
In the second poll we wanted to know how many of you are planning on tuning in next week. Just 18 per cent of just under 5000 polled said ‘hell yes’, with 33 per cent selecting ‘nope’ and 49 per cent ‘currently undecided’.
The silver lining is we’re yet to see Chris Harris and Rory Reid - who both excelled during the online-only ‘Extra Gear’ segment - in the main show. If anyone can improve the show in the eyes of CTzens, it’s them.
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
You know the new top gear has failed because they forgot roll over them reliants.
I like Matt LeBlanc, Sabine Schmitz, and Chris Harris but everyone else seems to be very lacking in any sort of driving skill. It also seems scripted in a way that always has Chris Evans win.
Yea that Top gun challenge was sooo scripted and fake, it would’ve taken Sabine like 5 seconds to get a shot on Chris. Not to mention that you can’t really have a dogfight in cars.
I’ll bet at least 23% of the 1/10 is because it isn’t Jeremy, Richard, and James on the show.
I wasn’t that bad, but Evans is not the right guy, in my opinion he wasn’t funny at all, everything looked overreacted…..Plus he tried to copy the voice of Clarkson with the TONIGHT (didn’t work…AT ALL)
Matt was good tho!
The show was so poor when everyone’s expectations were so high. Chris’s voice was annoying and shouty. Mat was great but over played the hard done by American. The Top Gun piece was tacky and while Sabine can drive she’s no entertainer.
Let’s see if Ried and the Harris can revive the show.
I just got to watch the first episode today.
I was very excited to have Top Gear back, and was kind of disappointed.
I liked the new “Star in a Rally Cross” segment, but Chris Evans makes it feel like forced excitement, and to me it resembled the “Please Clap” moment from Jeb Bush.
LeBlanc was probably the best presenter in the first episode.
Pretty much any interaction between Chris Evans and anyone else felt forced and his attempt at being funny just fell flat for me.
I said 6/10. I’ll watch the next episode hoping it will be better.
I gave it a fair watch with an open mind, but I’m very disappointed. The new Star in a Rallycross Car segment has potential, and I think it could actually be more interesting than the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car, but other than that… I’m struggling to come up with anything good to say about it. I was hoping they’d take the opportunity to go in a different direction with the show and try new things, but in the end, all I can take away from it is the complete lack of chemistry between the presenters, Chris Evans trying way too hard to be Jeremy Clarkson and coming nowhere close, the cringe when Matt LeBlanc introduced the Stig, Chris’ comment about not mentioning catering (ha ha, very funny joke, yes), the list goes on. It didn’t feel new or fresh, it felt like an awful attempt at trying to emulate their predecessors with very little effort spent on trying anything new.
Overall? I might give the next episode or two a watch to see if things improve, but I don’t have much hope. I wanted to like it, I really did, but the whole thing felt forced and scripted. It felt like they were trying to be like Clarkson/Hammond/May instead of just being themselves. Chris Evans especially so. Listening to his commentary on the Top Gun segment was almost cringeworthy if I’m honest.
Top Gear ? More like Over Drive
It’s hard to make a quality tv show when it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or maybe your year.
Guess they’re stuck in second gear.