After what seemed like years and years [and some more years] of waiting, “The Grand Tour” finally arrived with ASN’s Amazon Prime subscription…and promptly made all our memories of bad, recent “Top Gear” go away. It was like the sun coming up the next morning while you were sitting on a pristine tropical island beach after a BBC tornado full of sewage dumped on you the previous day.
The first episode intro, featuring the well-known trio of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May assembling, uniting and then leading an armada of cars rumbling toward a tent plopped down on a California dry lake bed was, as the British are fond of saying – brilliant. After that, the episode gave us a few snippets of what used to be beloved segments on the former “Top Gear” – talking [arguing] amongst themselves on a set and interacting with the audience, the introduction of the test track, new driver and celebrities – but each one has been tweaked [for what we can only assume is legal purposes stemming from the BBC lawyers].
The set itself is no longer the comfy chair for Jeremy and the couch for Hammond and May with a coffee table separating the trio. Now, it’s three chairs for all [none of which look particularly comfy] and a table for Hammond and May. The test track is different, of course, and was explained in a nice segment by Clarkson, but the new driver replacing the Stig, dubbed “The American” [and who is, in reality, Mike Skinner] was overburdened with far too many clichéd Southern colloquialisms as to induce cringeworthiness [a less ham-handed approach here could work better, the USA is a large country with many more relevant things we could laugh at ourselves about without resorting to lazy regionalized attempts at humor]. The celebrities are now killed upon arrival in each episode and while we suspect the origin of this is once again BBC-legal-based, whether or not one genuinely misses hearing celebrities blather on about something depends, we suppose, on the celebrity doing the blathering. Boris Johnson – who cares if he gets killed? Will Smith? That would be a crime. The one area where there is no change whatsoever from the boys and their previous stint at “Top Gear” is the interaction with the audience. The back-and-forth between them and the audience, while still scripted, at least gives us one of the former elements of the old show that was always good.
The other unchanged element is the proper car test. In the opening episode it is dubbed the “Holy Trinity” as it pits the McLaren P1, Ferarri LaFerrari and Porsche 918 against each other in a hypercar battle that features, of course, a drag race, some sliding around a track and Clarkson and May trying their best to detract from Hammond’s Porsche-ness. It was all classic “Top Gear” action.
In the end, most of the score ASN allots for this episode is based on the relief to actually – finally! – see an entertaining motoring show once again. One that has all elements for everybody – the gearhead and non-gearhead alike – and even allows us to overlook the minor annoyance of having to have an Amazon Prime subscription to view it. On a scale of 0-100, ASN awards the first episode of “The Grand Tour” a 91.