New Season Starts on BBCA
For anyone that cares, BBCA will air the two-hour season 23 premiere episode of Top Gear starting on 2016-05-30 (Monday), the day after the UK premiere. While the EPG says this is a single 2 hour show, the BBCA website says there are two shows. First the premiere episode itself for 90 minutes and a Extra Gear episode for 30 minutes. At this time the BBCA website does not provide a description for either show. Over on the BBC website the premiere episode description says: In the first show of the new series, Chris Evans takes the Dodge Viper
ACR to the home of Top Gun in Nevada, to battle Sabine Schmitz in a
Chevrolet Corvette Z06. Matt LeBlanc tackles wildest Morocco in
Somerset's finest off-roader, the Ariel Nomad.
Back on British soil, Evans and LeBlanc take a rather soggy road trip
to Blackpool in a pair of roofless Reliant three-wheelers, whereupon
they are tasked with defending the honour of their nations in a series
of gruelling UK-versus-USA challenges.
Back in the studio, this week's celebrity guests are Social Network
star Jesse Eisenberg and Gordon Ramsey.So much for Brad Pitt launching the new series. Immediately following is a new 1 hour compilation episode of Top Gear titled, From A-Z: Part 1. The BBCA website description says: Host John Bishop, kicks off this two-part alphabetical celebration of
the best of the Clarkson, Hammond and May years of Top Gear by looking
back at such memorable moments as Clarkson's drive along Death Road
and the gang's "Stretch Limo Challenge."Yet another Clarkson, Hammond and May retrospective from BBCA, no less right after the season premiere with the new Top Gear hosts. In addition to the two compilation episodes, there are hours upon hours of the previous seasons of Top Gear episodes that BBCA will be airing. They seem to have such faith in the new hosts they don't mind providing free advertisement for The Grand Tour.
Lastly, while this might be old news to many of you, I recently read that there is a cold relationship between Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, Evans supposedly said, "He’s old hat, what do we want him for?" Supposedly Evans is a '"control freak who thinks he can trample over everyone", with workers fed up with his ranting.' There is also bullying allegations against Evens for 'flashing a colleague, leaving a Radio 2 producer in tears' and concerns over the departure of an Top Gear executive producer.
Because of delays in production, the UK premiere was moved back two weeks to the 29th, BBCA the next day. The promos on BBCA kept vaguely saying 'starting in May', well that's cutting it close. The amount of episodes for this season was reduced from 8 to 6 episodes. One of their desperate goals was to get Top Gear on the air to 'avoid a clash later in the year with former host Jeremy Clarkson’s new car show on Amazon Prime.' If firing Clarkson and ultimately losing Hammond and May in the process, along with pissing off millions of loyal fans around the world wasn't bad enough, somehow this is what qualifies as a replacement. Marvelous.