In the last couple of months, both Amazon and Netflix seemed to find a winning, easy approach for creating their own content: find a beloved, nerdy reality show, sign the original cast, and retool it under a new name. The two new shows, The Grand Tour and The White Rabbit Project, brought on the casts of Top Gear and Mythbusters to reboot the concepts that made them great in the first place.
The White Rabbit Project, now streaming on Netflix, and The Grand Tour, which releases new episodes Fridays on Amazon, are a pair of interesting experiments. Both companies arguably just picked up incredibly popular shows that had come to an end, and rebranded them to recapture their audiences. More optimistically, you could say both companies recognized the appeal the stars brought to their shows, and decided to breathe new life into the existing concepts. Both takes are probably true.
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Following Jeremy Clarkson’s dismissal from Top Gear in 2015, he and his companions, Richard Hammond and James May, signed with Amazon for three years of The Grand Tour. Meanwhile, Discovery’s Mythbusters ended its run earlier this year (after unceremoniously booting Tory Belleci, Kari Byron, and Grant Imahara, the build team and secondary hosts, in 2015), only to have the concept rebooted as a reality show, for Mythbusters: The Search. So earlier this summer, Netflix signed the original build team for their own show, The White Rabbit Project.
What’s interesting about these two shows is how the companies have taken a pair of admired casts in two different directions. Top Gear fans will find a lot to recognize in The Grand Tour: slick travel videos of Clarkson, Hammond, and May messing around as they test out a variety of cars, race around tracks, and generally make fun of one another. Hammond recently told The Verge, “There was a lot of love for what we did in the past, so why would we get rid of that?”