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Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
Accessible to everyone and full of stunts, challenges and special segments, it’s irreverent, witty, self-deprecating, inclusive and passionate. The charisma and enthusiasm of the show’s presenters have helped make Top Gear a worldwide megabrand attracting a global audience over 500 million in more than 20 countries. This season’s highlights include a car chase in presenter-chosen old bangers for traffic cops, a race in the French Alps against extreme skiers, a race across Japan (a Nissan car versus public transport), a cross-country fox hunt (with Jeremy as the prey), and a Brits versus German Top Gear challenge. Of course, this season includes serious car journalism too, with exhaustive road tests of the latest models, man versus machine experiments, weekly power-tests featuring the world’s most exotic supercars and all the tried-and-tested Top Gear favorites also return.There has been talk of an American version of the BBC’s Top Gear, but the fact that it hasn’t happened yet is proba
Rating: (out of 14 reviews)
List Price: $ 29.98
Price: $ 17.99
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M. Larsen
November 3, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Review by M. Larsen for Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
Rating:
Wish it didn’t take so long for these to come out on video in the US! This show is really fun, even for those of us who aren’t real car enthusiasts. The hosts and the segments/challenges are top notch.
Lauren Sheldon
November 3, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Review by Lauren Sheldon for Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
Rating:
Americans who buy the entire “season” of Top Gear need to be warned that, in typical BBC series fashion, their “season” has only a fourth of the episodes that we’re used to. Why this is troubling isn’t the content or the show itself, which is bloody brilliant. Even someone like me, who isn’t a gear-head and can’t tell an Italian sports car from a Ford Focus, can love this show and the three guys with their boyish antics. I can’t get enough of it. But with a season of only 6 episodes and absolutely no other extras at all, I can’t justify the price (although this season just had its price lowered by Amazon–some of the other seasons are still priced at $30, or $5 per episode. That’s why I only gave it 3 stars–the show deserves 5 stars, but the price should have gotten zero.
Don K. Rhodes
November 3, 2010 at 4:20 pm
Review by Don K. Rhodes for Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
Rating:
This has to be the best way to watch Top Gear! Has the play all feature which is a must for TV series on DVD. The shows are so smooth compared to how they are on TV.
Alexander M. Walker
November 3, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Review by Alexander M. Walker for Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
Rating:
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.
Kristan O. Overstreet
November 3, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Review by Kristan O. Overstreet for Top Gear: The Complete Season 11
Rating:
Yes, the Top Gear nuts are back- racing across Japan in a car v. bullet train challenge, reviving fox hunting using a fox-colored Daihatsu sports vehicle, testing which supercar is the most efficient in race conditions (the winner doing less than 5 MPG), and ruining British-German diplomatic efforts with a contest against a German auto show. If you like either cars or British humor, you will love this show- and this set.
Season 11 is of special interest for aficionados of Japanese culture, as not one but three films take place there: the aforementioned “epic race” of sports car v. Japanese public transport, the track test of the Nissan GT-R from said race, and James May using a Japanese luxury car to deliver sumo wrestlers to a tournament. For these sequences alone, in my opinion, the set is worth the money to anime fans.
THAT SAID… the same problems that existed with the Season 10 set remain. The episodes are NOT completely uncut- Top Gear Stuntman’s sequences have all been left out, and other cuts may exist that I haven’t found in one viewing. That said, the cuts are less egregious than the Season 10 episodes- all news segments are present and (apparently) intact, as are all Stars in a Reasonably Priced Car. Viewers of BBC America will see quite a lot they didn’t before.
Skip points in the DVD set are limited to the start point of each film- none within the film segments themselves. Since some of these segments are half an hour long, that makes queueing up particular bits for friends a pain in the fundament.
Extras? Well, it has subtitles… with some serious transcription flaws. (Note: “Torque” and “talk” are not the same word, really they’re not.) No “deleted scenes,” no behind-the-scenes, no commentary. It’s a basic two-disc set of six episodes, with the frills limited to auto-playing trailers.
The show is excellent, and it’s good to have the series sets coming to the USA… but I really wish the DVD release was as good as the show being released.