Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
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DVD details
Actor: James May, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard HammondBrand: Warner Brothers
Host: Jeremy Clarkson
Host: Richard Hammond
Host: James May
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Widescreen, 1.78:1
Running Time: 364 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2010-01-12
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: BBC Worldwide
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- Subtitled; Color; DVD; Widescreen; NTSC
DVD Reviews of Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
DVD Review: Still love Top Gear, but this DVD release has no extras!
Summary: 3 Stars
No one could blame you if you imagined even for a second that a show about flashy sports cars wasn't your cup of tea. Until last year I was in the same shabby, Winnebago [read: boat]. Usually, when someone says to me "It must be good, look at how many people watch it!" I laugh it off. Television programming tends to be more successful the more mindless it is, I'm sorry if you disagree, but more often than not it's the plain-spoken truth. American shows like American Idol pat themselves on the back when they hit 38 million viewers per episode. Top Gear? It boasts 350 million viewers worldwide and frankly, I can't blame a single one of them.
Hosts Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May love themselves a fast, sleek, beautifully styled automobile. They rarely agree on which car fits all those descriptions, but that's half the fun. Watching them charge headlong into the producer-assigned "challenges" to push a given vehicle past its recognized abilities usually results in a large amount of fun. Maybe they're forcing outdated Italian race cars to prove their merit long after their glory days, or perhaps they're attempting to outfox a pack of hounds in a sports utility vehicle. Whatever the task, they tend to offer some amusing color commentary after the fact.
Even if Top Gear has begun to tilt slightly further towards being a comedy show with cars than a car show with comedy, it's still wildly entertaining. In its eleventh season, Top Gear has made a noticeable effort to cut back on huge events like the cross-desert rally of the previous season, and in exchange features a single mission-per-episode format. If you follow the show regularly you'd know that that means every episode of the season is now essentially the same with no two or three episode arcs to break it up. With a simple six-episode season there's not much need to break it up, so the omission of that multi-episode mission doesn't negatively affect Top Gear's eleventh season all that much.
Normal segments include basic races, "Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car" (which was notably expanded to feature two stars per episode), "Power Laps" featuring a mysterious driver called The Stig attempting to set lap records in different cars, and "The Cool Wall" a frequently shifting measure of which cars make you a cock or cool by ownership association. "News", a segment based entirely around the hosts taking potshots at cars in the news (and each other), may be the most comedy-based of all the segments. They may talk about cars somewhat, but it's really an excuse to deliver some funny automotive one-liners.
Few shows can transcend viewer reluctance like this. You might detest talking about cars or you might be totally baffled by people who get gaga for horsepower, but there's something ultimately compelling about Top Gear that enables it to overcome that initial aversion. Counting myself amongst that lot, I still laugh in spite of myself in each episode. Give Top Gear a chance and you'll find yourself oddly enraptured in the rapport of the hosts, their antics both on and off-road and the entertaining challenges they're asked to perform in some of the dumpiest sports cars you'll ever see. There's no American equivalent to Top Gear (NBC started to make one but dropped it) and its entertainment value easily crosses over. Give it a shot, you'll find it quite enjoyable, car enthusiast or not.
Guest appearances for series 11 include Alan Carr, Justin Lee Collins, Rupert Penry-Jones, Peter Firth, James Corden, Rob Brydon, Fiona Bruce, Kate Silverton, Peter Jones, Theo Paphitis, and the show's fastest guest ever Jay Kay.
DVD Bonus Features
The set is surprisingly barren in the extras department. Considering how much fun they seem to have making this show, it is hard to believe there wasn't a gag reel or outtakes from some of the challenges.
Description of Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
TOP GEAR 11 - DVD MovieThere has been talk of an American version of the BBC's Top Gear, but the fact that it hasn't happened yet is probably a good thing, for aside from the obvious (i.e., the automobiles that are its raisons d'être, many of them shown in sequences filmed so beautifully and edited so slickly that the effect is equivalent to car porn), the show is distinguished by its ineffable Englishness. As usual, in this, its 11th season (with six episodes on two discs), most of that comes from hosts James May, Richard Hammond, and Jeremy Clarkson--especially Clarkson, who offers his typical array of droll witticisms (he describes the Nissan GT-R as "discordant? like Stravinsky designed it," while the Alfa Romeo 8C Competzione, "the most beautiful car ever made," is so gorgeous that "I wouldn't care if the sat-nav had Tourette's"). Each episode is likely to include a look at some fabulously unaffordable luxury car (in addition to the above, there are the Ferrari Scuderia, "the bastard love child of Stephen Hawking and Rambo"; the Galue, a virtual Rolls Royce clone from Japan; and the Mercedes AMG Black, "the kin of Cain"), plus a "cheap car challenge," in which the three hosts must buy a vehicle for less than a thousand pounds and, in one instance, convert it to a police car, and "Star(s) in a Reasonably Priced Car," in which celebrities drive a lap around a racetrack in an ordinary sedan (these segments will be of limited interest to non-Brit viewers, as the celebs are little known elsewhere). But the best bits are the competitions pitting an automobile against various other forms of transportation. In "Race Across Japan," Clarkson drives the Nissan some 400 miles across that country while May and Hammond ride the bullet train, a ferry, and a cable car; in another segment, Hammond races an Audi RS6 down a mountain road while two skiers hurtle down the mountain itself. As always, the camera work and production values are first-rate, and the show is brimming with fantastic scenery and judiciously chosen effects work. And even if Top Gear may be starting to run out of gas--this season isn't quite as much fun as those from previous years--this is still the best car show around. --Sam Graham
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