I just finished my first episode of “Smash Lab” on the Discovery Channel.
Not bad. The show definitely lived up to its name – I saw more vehicles get smashed into concrete barricades on this show than in the last 28-years of my life!
It seems that this show is definitely a spin-off of Myth Busters. I’m not complaining, I’ll DVR them both every week that they’re new episodes!
More on the show at Discovery’s website.
I’m half way through the show for the second time and I really want to change the channel, it is that painful to watch. The team portrays themselves as experts yet so far they have failed misserably at everything they are trying.
Only one thing to say about this show: Disappointment
This episode should have been trashed, and my guess is so will the rest of the season.
Smash Lab is painful to watch. They’ve taken the Mythbusters formula, removed the personality, removed science and inserted more crashes, collisions and explosions. Watching the “hot chick” err I mean the “scientist” attempt to explain simple theories and principals using hand gestures and 10$ words is laughable. This show seems to be targeted for the same mouth breathing knuckle draggers who are into “Worlds Scariest Police Chases” and “Jackass”. FAIL.
Long ago I had once said “If you want a hit show just blow stuff up, crash some cars and get a hot chick to host it. Nothing else matters”. Smash lab has made a liar out of me.
Stef and I are big fans of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe and of course Mythbusters so when we saw the new addition to the line up, Smash Lab, we were eager to catch the excitement. We set the TiVo to record it the very day it was available on the recording list. Weeks passed and with each add that tantalized us we grew more and more excited to see the new “blow it up” show. So Wednesday it finely aired and was recorded. Last night we sat down to watch. Discovery, I want that hour back!
Lets start at the top. The rather uninspired opening set the tone for a lack luster hour of boredom. Our four main characters would be forgettable if not for the fact that both Stef and I were so annoyed by them that we actually started muting their dialog at times. I wont even bother trying to look the names of each of them up. My hope is that they will quickly go away and never bother any of us again but I will relate the thoughts that went through our minds mere seconds after they dribbled off the screen.
Our hot chick is simply atrocious. Her voice is grating. Her face, although all the right parts are there, simply fails to please. The body is thin and curvy which I personally love yet somehow she manages to get it all just a little out of proportion. Don’t even get me started on her teeth. You’re on TV get a stylist! And they bill her as the “Genius Scientist”! At what point did she even vaguely display even a little genius? If you’re going to bill someone as the Scientist or Genius then you better be ready to back it up. At no point in the show did they ever manage to even slightly back it up. They even failed to show her “running the numbers” a pointless, but at least scientific, shot they could have at least attempted.
The three guys billed as “The Designer”, “The Ideas Guy” and “The Engineer” are again forgettable if not for the slight annoyances they constantly displayed throughout the show. Both Stef and I were struck by how much “patting” was going on. They patted the cars. They patted the equipment. They patted each other. Enough with the patting already. One of them seemed to have his arms glued across his chest for the entire show. Always a great way to invite people to like you. (Sarcasm for those who missed that) Another had hair that would make Jimmy Neutron jealous (look him up). And at a critical moment in the show one was even “left hanging” with his fist bang. (Don’t know what else to call it when two “manly men” bash their fists together in triumph.) All in all they simply failed in whole to capture even the slightest interest from us.
So what about those titles? At no point in the show did these “role defining” titles ever even vaguely manifest themselves. Each character went off and did virtually the same thing as the other. There was no “Scientist”, no “Designer”, no “Engineer” and no “Ideas Guy”. Just four forgettable people wandering rather clumsily through the motions.
Before you go off the handle on my personal critique of their performance just remember they are the hosts of a TV show. Their primary job is to interest and entertain the viewers. They failed at that completely.
So what of the secondary job of smashing and blowing things up for our entertainment? Wow, I never thought that my reaction to seeing car crashes could be so indifferent. Seriously the cut in stock footage from crash test labs was more exciting than the actual crashes they preformed. To compound the issue they have their presentation all bass ackwords. Time and again throughout the show they send the car full speed running up to the obstacle that will go “crash and boom” only to hit us at the moment of impact with the super slow motion. It really killed the moment. Smash Lab learn from a success like Mythbusters, show the crash in full then come back and give us the slow motion high speed camera shot replay. Heck watch a football game sometime. The excitement of seeing the crash is simply derailed when you slow it down right as it was getting good.
To further the problem we saw the same crashes over and over. Yes science is repetitive. I know that. But you’re doing a TV show not real science. Give us a bit of variety please. If you want to do science get yourselves to a lab and off my TV. We sat and watched virtually identical cars hit over and over into virtually identical obstacles. It was boring. Even if the first crash had not been derailed by the slomo cut, the next three to six times we saw the virtually identical crashes would have still been just that, identical. Again watch Mythbusters sometimes. They break it up. Give us a bit of this and a bit of that. Throw in a touch of science and some characters that are truly endearing in one manner or another and we will watch.
So what about the results? I mean they are billing this show as a science show, right? They claim that they are doing work to further our safety by applying various technologies from one application to another. What did they find out on this fine show? Nothing. Seriously the show closes the way it began on a whimper of mediocrity. They, in the end, failed to prove or disprove anything at all. All that smashing and yapping just petered out to a big “We learned nothing.” It was actually kinda frustrating to watch this lack luster mix of repetitive crashes, uninteresting characters and poor direction all the way through and have no payoff at all in the end. I seriously felt cheated.
What were we watching this for? To be entertained. We were not. To be educated. We were not. To “meet”, through the TV, interesting characters that we could come to identify with in some manner or another. We simply could not. With all this disappointment from their “Grand Opening” show I doubt they will get this one on track for the full season but then maybe Im wrong. Smash lab made a liar out of me once maybe they can do it again. But I doubt it.
Very well said, Joshua. I sat through the first two episodes, during which I was yelling at the television. The results of each test were foreseeable long before they began and the hosts seemed dumbfounded when their “designs” failed.
In the second episode they were supposed to hurricane-proof a trailer house with carbon fiber. All they did was nail plywood all over it, then completely cover it with carbon fiber. I’ve got a newsflash for them, the majority of trailer house residents don’t live in them for any reason other than that they’re cheap. And carbon fiber isn’t cheap.
They kept talking about the properties of carbon fiber, but during one of the tests they seemed amazed at how a cinder block smashed the carbon fiber covered plywood they had hacked together. CF is only strong in one direction if it is a unidirectional weave! Any “scientist” or “engineer” should know that.
This show needs to be cancelled. The hosts seem like annoying college dropouts that learned the big words, but not what they mean and the subject matter has been completely impractical and unuseful.
I saw your show on Air rated concrete to slow vehicles down and wasn’t impressed with results. I think be a trucker that you should use pea gravel at the same depth of 18 inches,would be more cost effective and provide better results. It is already being used on run away truck ramps on steep grades and you would be suprise how fast it will stop a car as well. I found your show quite interesting.
Myth Busters wanna be giving science a bad name.
I’m going to explain some science they forgot to use on Smash Lab episode 3. At least in Mythbusters, they try to scale the experiments so that they can get a general feel for how the full scale test will run.
Not so in this episode.
The locomotive used in the test was an EMD GP35 and these weigh 255,000 lbs. The scale of the locomotive used in ‘Smash Lab’ was a frame sled made out of angle iron. What they should have done was made a sled that weighed a scale of 255,000 lbs, instead of the scale they used which probably never saw the upside of 100 pounds. Now the car – couch scale simulation was equally laughable – if the full scale test was weighted the same, you would have had a lightweight, empty passenger car (the locomotive) crashing into an empty coal car (the car).
I’m all for shows in this genre but please, PLEASE show us the science behind your test, USE the science behind your test and for the love of God, please scale the tests accordingly. You might then be able to actually make use of the extrapolated data!
All of these cats have fuuny looking hair! I saw the show on earthquakes and houses and the woamns hair looked greasy. Yo, how about the dude with hair in a wierd jimmy neuton point? He’s a little old for that drama….And her jeans with that ny scrubbed fade look, man I cant get past thier wierd appearences…