It’s fairly routine for an online streaming service to revive a canceled or troubled show, but the latest example has a twist: Last week, Amazon confirmed that former “Top Gear” hosts Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May will reunite for a new car-centric program on Amazon Prime, a few months after Clarkson was fired from the BBC hit. So not so much “saving a show” as it is “reuniting all of the stars for a very similar-sounding show.”
BBC’s “Top Gear,” of course, is one of the biggest shows in Britain, worth about £50 million ($78 million) a year and attracting a reported 350 million viewers worldwide. In the spring, Clarkson — a popular if incredibly polarizing figure — was let go after an investigation into his “unprovoked physical and verbal attack” against one of the producers. It was the last straw for the BBC, already used to Clarkson’s ill-received comments and controversies, though 1 million fans signed a petition for his return.
A few weeks after Clarkson was fired, Hammond and May announced they would not continue “Top Gear” without Clarkson; last month, BBC signed on TV and BBC radio host Chris Evans as the new star.
“Me and Hammond with a surrogate Jeremy is a nonstarter, it just wouldn’t work,” May told the Guardian. “That would be lame, or ‘awks’ as young people say.”
