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

Turtletrekker

Turtletrekker

Admiral
Admiral
This seems to have slipped under the radar here, but the Mythbusters "Build Team", Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci, have landed a new show on Netflix titled, "The White Rabbit Project", which Is described as being "Mythbusters in Wonderland".

I loved the Build Team as much, if not more, than the actual stars of "Mythbusters", so I will definitely give this show a shot. But what will differentiate this from what they did on "Mythbusters"? Will this be more of the same, a spin-off in all but name, or will it be its own unique thing?
 
Turtletrekker said:
I loved the Build Team as much, if not more, than the actual stars of "Mythbusters", so I will definitely give this show a shot. But what will differentiate this from what they did on "Mythbusters"? Will this be more of the same, a spin-off in all but name, or will it be its own unique thing?
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What I gather is that it will be about "going down the rabbit hole of the Internet." It sounds like it'll be similar to the Mythbusters segments where they tested viral videos and free-energy kits and other stuff from online. But that's just a guess based on the bare-bones information we have so far.

Not sure what to expect. On the one hand, a show on Netflix wouldn't have to be as commercial as MB and wouldn't be under as much pressure to prioritize spectacle over science, so it could be more legitimately educational and interesting. On the other hand, I often felt the junior team's experimental methodology was sloppier than Adam & Jamie's -- they seemed too quick to draw conclusions based on a single round of tests, for instance. Or at least that's the way it seemed; maybe stuff was edited out.
 
I'll definitely check it out, though I have some of the same misgivings as the previous poster. The junior team didn't seem to focus on the science quite so much. In many ways, even though Jamie and Adam certainly took advantage of opportunities to blow stuff up, the junior team seemed more interested in the spectacle.

I think that the show definitely has potential, I just hope this "rabbit hole" of the internet doesn't involve endless viral videos that may or may not have been faked. Because frankly, I just wouldn't care either way.
 
Spot's Meow said:
I'll definitely check it out, though I have some of the same misgivings as the previous poster. The junior team didn't seem to focus on the science quite so much. In many ways, even though Jamie and Adam certainly took advantage of opportunities to blow stuff up, the junior team seemed more interested in the spectacle.
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Of course, I assume that a lot of those decisions were made by the show's writers and producers. For all that the on-air presenters gave the impression that they were making all this stuff up themselves, they were at least working with the writers and producers in making the decisions, if not outright working for them. So we can't be sure how much of the difference in approach was because of the hosts as opposed to the producers. It was undoubtedly Discovery that was pushing for more spectacle. On a Netflix show, they'd be under less pressure to be commercial and could hopefully focus more on the science as a result.
 
publiusr said:
You'd think Naked and Afraid would be streaming--and Mythbusters kept on cable...
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Why? Commercial TV is at the mercy of ratings and advertisers, so it inevitably tends toward more lowbrow, crowd-pleasing fare -- which is why the formerly educational Discovery Channel is now a cesspool of "reality" garbage. Whereas Netflix is a subscription service and isn't subject to such pressures, so it's a better place for programming that's smarter or more niche-oriented.
 
I've always liked the trio, and you could tell there was some chemistry between them, so it was only a matter of time they'd land a show together. I hope it won't be too much like those viral video segments as I felt those were some of the weaker stuff they've done.
 
Here's the trailer for White Rabbit Project, which premieres on Netflix December 9:

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It does look largely like a revival of the Mythbusters format, though perhaps with more of a historical twist; it looks like they're incorporating recreations/dramatizations of past events that they're testing the reality of. But they are still building stuff and doing weird experiments. It looks more promising than The Science Channel's so-called Mythbusters: The Search competition show.
 
White Rabbit Project is up on Netflix now, and I've watched the first episode. Naturally it isn't quite the same as Mythbusters, in that they aren't testing myths per se, but it's pretty similar -- each episode focuses on a particular theme that the team explores the viability of, apparently with six examples of each theme being weighed against each other for how effective or plausible they are. For instance, the debut episode involves testing technologies that could give "superpowers" like flight (jet suits), electric bolts (Tesla coil), invisibility, etc. The dodgiest one is "mind control," which was really about muscle control, and I wasn't entirely convinced they were on the level there. Anyway, only some of the entries involved the trio actually building and testing stuff themselves; a couple of segments were just interviewing inventors working on technologies like jet suits and powered exoskeletons.Still, there was some decent science/educational content in the first episode -- more so than in some of the later Mythbusters episodes, frankly.

I've only read the summaries of the other 9 episodes so far, but other topics include historical jailbreaks, scams, and heists, strange WWII weapons, and which long-promised sci-fi technologies are closest to reality. Not sure how those will pan out yet. But it's good to see the trio back together, though I kind of miss the Mythbusters narrator. (The trio does their own narration, something that Grant does best and Tory does worst.)
 
Sweet, I'll check out the first episode later tonight. I lost interest in Mythbusters when the Build Team left.
 
I didn't like the second episode as much as the first. The topic was noteworthy jailbreaks and escapes from history, and only one of the six involved a building project to recreate the event -- and that was just done by Tory with a couple of anonymous helpers, instead of by the trio working together. The others were depicted by actor recreations and documentary footage/photos, and that wasn't as interesting. Okay, maybe it's technically educational in a historical sense, but there isn't really any science being presented. And the "rank the six items on three criteria and pick a winner" thing, which seems to be the standard format for the series, is pretty arbitrary compared to Busted/Plausible/Confirmed.

Overall, the whole thing is too slick and staged. Like the segments where the hosts pretend to be talking live to interview subjects on a transparent monitor screen, but it's obvious that there's just prerecorded interview footage being superimposed onto a fake screen. And the trio aren't doing things together much -- they mostly just interact in the framing segments. I miss seeing them build and test stuff as a team.
 
That takes resources they probably don't have. We need an Elon Musk for science television--dump money into programs--and to hell with ratings.
 
publiusr said:
That takes resources they probably don't have. We need an Elon Musk for science television--dump money into programs--and to hell with ratings.
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Seems to me they have plenty of resources, given how much effort they've put into these elaborate actor recreations and slick special effects. They're just choosing to focus less on building and testing things themselves, and when they do, it's individually instead of as a team. Perhaps that was a conscious choice to avoid being too similar to Mythbusters, for legal reasons. But the problem is that, since they can't be specifically about testing "myths," it's more just a general "looking at weird/cool stuff" format and it doesn't have as clear a focus. I mean, episode 1 was "What are some potential technological 'superpowers' and how practical are they in reality?" -- which is a very Mythbustery sort of topic -- but episode 2 was "Here are some cool jailbreaks/escapes that people did," which was more just a generic vaguely-historical edutainment thing. I mean, the Mythbusters did a number of jailbreak episodes, but it was always testing whether the reported technique would actually work. Only one of the six escapes here involved that kind of testing, and the other five were just descriptions/dramatizations of escapes that mostly weren't nearly as interesting in their methods.

So maybe choosing to focus on six topics every episode is a problem. In the case of episode 2, only three of the jailbreaks were interesting in terms of the techniques that were used -- two of the others were just brute force and chutzpah, and one was basically just comic relief, about a male prisoner switching clothes with his girlfriend in a conjugal visit and walking out of prison that way. Now, that's one where they could've tested it Mythbusters-style -- could a man change clothes with a woman and successfully fool the guards? -- and it would've been a perfect opportunity to embarrass Tory, which is just the sort of thing they'd love to do. But they didn't bother.
 
Only watched part of the first episode so far, due to a lack of time, but yes, I do agree that it feels a bit too slick. I also think that it moves along a bit too quickly. If they featured less topics and focused more on them, perhaps they could get some more building and testing in, and maybe we'd have stronger episodes. As it is, it feels a bit too rapid-fire, bordering on those "top 10" format shows.
 
Yeah, I don't like those top-ten shows, and the rating of the sequences in ep 1 was kind of annoying. But I had fun. Kari was having way too much fun controlling Tori, and I loved Tori's "Why? Wh-h-hyyy?" :lol:
 
So yeah, finished the episode, and I really dislike their countdown at the end. It makes it feel cheap, like filler material. I think to me that's the biggest downer from this show, because I know it can be so much more with the resources they have.

If this gets a second season, I hope they retool it. Cut down the amount of topics to maybe 4, which would allow them more time to go in-depth and do what they do best.
 
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