"The White Rabbit Project", Mythbusters "Build Team" lands Netflix show

Similar... Though, it would be more like Adam and Jamie creating White Rabbit Project, the premiere being the biggest hit on Netflix, and the show getting a big boost in its budget versus its predecessor.

I haven't seen episodes 9 and 10 yet, though, so I don't know what segments intrinsical thinks are similar to the Grand Tour (or why).

 

Episode 9, about technologies invented before their time, was pretty good. This is a more interesting historical episode than their heist and scam ones, because it's about science and invention, so I learned stuff. The Teleharmonium segment was particularly fascinating -- I even learned something I hadn't known about the Hammond organ and how it worked. I do think it was a stretch to refer to Edward Muybridge's film loops as "animated GIFs," though (not to mention that I think they were mispronouncing "GIF" -- I gather its inventors intended it to be pronounced with a soft G). And the brief segment about the "1920s wireless 'phone" was a waste of time, unless it was to debunk the Internet meme that this was a thing. (I've read about this before -- they could've covered the fact that the word "telephone" was originally used to refer to radios as well as two-way communication devices.)

Speaking of words, I'm a bit annoyed that they keep using "criteria" as both singular and plural. The singular is "criterion."

 

The pronunciation of GIF has long history of disagreement. The Oxford Engish Dictionary accepts both versions.

 

Tory's assertion that the victorian wireless phone isn't a wireless phone because it's a radio doesn't make any sense. A modern mobile phone has both an electromagnetic receiver as well as a short range electromagnetic transmitter, thus it IS a radio.

 

Many phones have been radios over the decades, but that doesn't mean every radio is a phone. When we say "telephone," we're talking about a two-way communication device. The device in the old film footage was only for listening to music, not for talking to other people, so it didn't serve the function of a telephone in the modern sense of the word. It was more of an ancestor of the transistor radios people used to carry to listen to radio stations on the go.

 

The final episode of the season, about speed records, was okay, and the reconstruction of that 1902 high-speed electric car was interesting. It was pretty uneven, though, and it underlines the silliness of trying to rank such different things as a human runner, a car, and a jet against each other; plus the need to include six things per episode means they have some pretty lame filler segments sometimes. They need to work on the format if they get a second season.