Television Yak

The tenth season premiere stranded Adam and Jamie on a not-so-deserted island and stranded the build team on… well, I couldn’t care less, honestly. Grant is probably back in San Francisco, making passionate love to a sex-bot, while Tori makes passionate love to a woman and Kari… uh, what does Kari do? I guess she just watches. The show’s done its fair share of selachian-leaping ever since M5 seceded from M7, so “Duct Tape Island” was a nice return to the odd couple dynamic that powered the Mythbusters at their early best, “Ping-Pong Rescue” and “Cola Myths” for example, and also so much Mythbusters slash fiction. It’s the best episode Mythbusters has made since “Alcohol Myths” way back in season six, and also a disappointing demonstration of the show’s ever-expanding toothlessness and compensating staginess.

The duct tape episodes tend to be Mythbusters high points, relying on interesting builds and the cast chemistry for a story instead of Discovery’s usual stand-by of gratuitous explosions, or shooting shit, or demonstrating how some scene from a Michael Bay movie wouldn’t happen that way in real life. Duct tape never fails to impress, plus it’s probably the show’s most accessible building material, one that makes the frustrating pre-episode legal disclaimer even more superfluous. I could make duct tape shoes. Well, not me exactly, but someone dextrous could do it. Someone dextrous could even re-construct the saggy duct tape bridge, although maybe stringing it across a drydock is something still best left to the experts or the Mythbusters.

I was expecting “Duct Tape Island” to be one of the Jamie-heavier episodes, given his background as a wilderness survival expert. Then again, I was also expecting Adam and Jamie to film and camp on a deserted island, since spending a week in the wilderness alone with nothing but a camera crew isn’t exactly pushing the Discovery Channel into new territory here. I liked Jamie keeping his hyperactive better half out of trouble, even if the scene where Adam oh-so-nearly dove into stagnant water was so obviously staged. It was classic Mythbusters for just a second, the conflict between Jamie’s rationality-driven paternalism and Adam’s id.

I realized that Jamie is really what’s kind of eroded in the show as it’s grown more popular and more commercial. Back in the series’ younger days, Jamie was a unique presence — the TV host who had no interest in being on TV. He wasn’t just uncomfortable, he was outright contemptuous of the Mythbusters as performance troupe theme of the show. With Adam’s ever-consuming need for audience attention in frame, Jamie’s stoicism looked even more goofy than his beret and mustache. That’s what I liked so much about “Alcohol Myths” — Jamie, the grumpy, logical engineer who distills physical attractiveness down to “general signs of health,” way farther than any normal person should take the idea.

That man would not build a surfboard out of duct tape if he didn’t first know how to surf.

Coming up, myths from date-night movies. Ugh, how I yearn for the good old days.

My heart sank a little bit when Kari introduced the “Dynamite Ax” so-called myth. M7 got an email from someone who clearly shouldn’t be handling dynamite claiming that an enterprising lumberjack could tie a stick of dynamite to an arrow, ignite the dynamite, shoot the arrow into a tree, and the explosion would cleave the tree straight in half. Oh, that old myth.

I have two problems with the Discovery Channel. The first is that, with the exception of the BBC specials Earth, Life, and now Human Planet, Discovery has gone from a science channel to a very red-state redneck channel, and no there’s not a lot of overlap between the two. Pretty much every Discovery Channel show is some nutball either blowin’ shit up, or building some obscene vehicle, or a big-ass gun, or ideally all three. And then Discovery has like fifty shows about working class dudes fishing, including Deadliest Catch, Lobstermen, Swords: Life on the Line, River Monsters, and something I swear I’m not making up called Man vs. Fish starring “extreme fisherman” Matt Watson. And Mythbusters is following the same pattern, at least to the degree that a bunch of actually-educated San Fransisco artists can be expected to. I feel the ratio of actual scientific information imparted by the hosts to gratuitous explosions is getting dangerously low.

My other problem with the Discovery Channel is that, as the station turns more and more to serialized reality programming, they’re also becoming more and more comfortable with contrived drama and the fact that Discovery’s producers are more and more handing the audience a narrative rather than the David Attenborough straightforward play-by-play. It’s not enough to show lions chasing gazelle as the circle of life; now we need to take sides with the lions or the gazelle. There’s junior motorcycle-building guy versus senior motorcycle-building guy. Dual Survival: hippie weirdo nature freak versus angry military survivalist guy. Man versus wild… which has run out of interesting environments for Bear Grylls to explore, so now they just have him performing ridiculous stunts.

Mythbusters is, of course, also a lie. It’s the nature of the documentary — of any film, really — the cameraman turns toward one thing and we pretend everything else isn’t there. The editors take hours and hours of footage and pretend it’s only forty-something minutes. We assume that the events in the show happened in the same chronological order that they’re presented in. I’m not criticizing Mythbusters for being what it is — I’m saying that the seams are starting to show and dynamite ax had a strong sense that this was not a myth that perpetuates in the world independent of the television show. There was a conference room, a meeting at Beyond Productions, and someone there wanted to tie dynamite to an arrow and shoot it into a tree.

The show began slipping with the Confederate rocket episode, when the narrator egregiously bleeped out the chemicals Grant used to make nitrous oxide (hint: it’s ammonium nitrate and water) and that Kari used to make gun cotton (nitric acid and sulfuric acid). Adam and Jamie, of course, always had personalities that came out on screen, but the narrator was essentially a talking chemistry textbook, saying something because it’s true and not saying something else because it’s not true. But suddenly the narrator is choosing to withhold information, which leads to the question, “What else is he not telling us?”

Let me say that I don’t believe Mythbusters has faked any of its experiments or any of the results. But you know, maybe something did beat the speed camera, for example, but it just happened to be cut for time. Or “for time.” The problem is that Mythbusters only thrives on the hosts’ personalities before it devolves into just another Discovery show of boring people blowing up dumb shit — and a lot of that personality is Adam and Jamie’s apparently genuine fascination with science and therefore tied up in the legitimacy of their scientific process. It’s not like they’re characters on Mythbusters, with goals to achieve and conflicts to overcome. Their sole purpose is to provide information, and if it even seems like they’re failing to do that — watch the obviously contrived “aftershows” on the Discovery Channel website for examples of this — then Mythbusters just isn’t Mythbusters.