They Finally Filled The 'Three Guys In Cars' TV Show Vacuum

When Top Gear was unceremoniously pulled off the air after Jeremy Clarkson punched one of the show's producers 11 years ago, the "three guys in cars" TV show format was arguably never the same. The BBC and a revolving door of presenters tried (and is apparently still trying) to recapture the magic but never really did. Neither did numerous copycat YouTube productions or — yeah, I'll say it — Clarkson, Hammond, and May themselves with their new Amazon show, The Grand Tour.

Over the past eight years, TGT did have its moments, and that old trio will forever be credited with changing automotive media, if not car culture as a whole, forever. But it also became clear that when it comes to creating car TV, their best years were behind them. In other words, the magic was gone or, at the very least, starting to turn stale.

Last Friday night, as I sat on my couch watching three fighter jets relay race a procession of increasingly nutty American supercars on the first episode of the new, rebooted version of The Grand Tour, I felt it again. Ladies and gentlemen, old Top Gear is back.

For those who need a refresher, Clarkson, Hammond, and May put out an emotional and satisfying finale episode of TGT back in 2024 that saw all three hang up their car show-hosting capes for good. Earlier this year, Amazon announced the show would come back with three new, much younger hosts: Thomas Holland and James Engelsman of car YouTube's Throttle House fame and Francis Bourgeois of, uh, TikTok trainspotting fame.

All six episodes of the new show premiered on Prime Video late last week and, let me tell you, the content slaps. I'll try not to give too much away (stop reading now if you don't want any spoilers), but for the most part, each episode is its own thing, or what viewers of old TG might call "specials." There's no studio, and there's no tent, although there are a few connective segments filmed inside cars or with the guys inside the show's "production office" that serve to set up whatever you're about to see next.

And each episode seems to have been built to cover one of every major format of old-school Top Gear — there's one with new supercars, one with old sports cars, one where they race public transit, one with staged challenges, one with a hilarious sight gag kids will love, and one where they participate in organized motorsport. In other words, it's a textbook series of TG circa 2008.

That said, there are no celebrity interviews (thank god), there's no news segment, there's no lap board, and there's no not-Stig, although Holland does manage to sneak in a couple of "power test"-style car reviews throughout the season, one of which might just be the most beautiful-looking piece of car media I've ever laid eyes on.

It's all killer no filler, and unlike other, rivaling productions, TGT benefits from a lot of the original behind-the-scenes team that made Top Gear what it was. Longtime producer Andy Wilman remains involved, and so does director of photography Ben Joiner, who has been pointing expensive cameras at cars throughout the entire Clarkson era of TG, and you can tell.

BAFTA-winning production and an Amazon budget are nothing if the people onscreen can't hack it, but thankfully, Holland, Engelsman, and Bourgeois knock it out of the park. Yes, you can sort of tell that whoever cast them did it with the loose archetypes established by their predecessors in mind. But "loose" is the keyword here because at pretty much no point do you feel like they're trying to be Clarkson, Hammond, or May — the death knell of anybody trying to step into their shoes.

Those who have been watching Throttle House for years will know that what you see on Amazon is just sort of how Thomas and James are. But against any and all audience expectations, Francis might just be the breakout star here. He is unbridledly nerdy, unintentionally hilarious, and his sheer excitement when he experiences a fast car (or spots a particularly rare locomotive) is infectious.

And, as Clarkson put it to the Radio Times at the National Television Awards on Tuesday night, "Critically, they're not famous people who like cars. They're proper petrol heads."

And taking a cursory scan of social media, none of this seems like a hot take. Sure, there are some predictably negative comments from people who you can tell have not actually watched it and whose primary complaint is that they literally aren't Clarkson, Hammond, or May. (If that's you, no new version of this show will satisfy your requirements. It is metaphysically impossible.) While some others unhelpfully chant about how "they'd rather just watch old clips of Top Gear" as if watching the new show legally bars them from watching the old one.

Among those with the propensity to try new things and have seen the new Grand Tour, though, reception is generally positive to straight-up glowing. The show is currently sitting at 80 and 81% on Rotten Tomatoes. Autoblog likes it. The Autopian likes it. The Guardian doesn't really like it, though, but to fans of OG Top Gear, that's probably an endorsement more than anything. And the general mood on r/thegrandtour subreddit is positive, and remember — those are Redditors we are talking about, a group very much willing to call a spade a spade and have the upvotes to back it up.

So, yeah. They finally did it. It took a decade, about a dozen rotating Top Gear UK hosts, and what feels like a half-dozen iterations of Top Gear America, but they finally figured out a "three guys in cars" TV show that can indeed hold a candle to the Sunday night program we seemingly all grew up on in its very best years. And if this is what their first season is like, I can't wait for season two.