Amazon's 'The Grand Tour' appears headed for a less-than-grand close

Hollywood trade publication Variety reports Amazon Prime Video is "likely to part ways with Jeremy Clarkson" and the two shows he fronts, "The Grand Tour" and "Clarkson's Farm." Clarkson still hasn't emerged from the firestorm he caused with the regular column he writes for British tabloid The Sun. In his piece from December 16, he lobbed grenades at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry Windsor and Meghan Markle. The column's title was "One day, Harold [Prince Harry] the glove puppet will tell the truth about A Woman Talking B*ks." One line in the piece was, "I hate her. Not like I hate [Scottish National Party leader] Nicola Sturgeon or [British serial killer] Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level." And those are not the worst of the lines people complained about.

You know those scenes in sci-fi war thrillers where eight or nine thousand Space Navy battleships focus their combined fire on an enemy? Yeah, that's what happened to Clarkson and The Sun.

The show host apologized to the public. He apologized to Harry and Meghan. The Sun apologized. Clarkson apologized to the public again, and sent Harry and Meghan an e-mail of apology. It's not enough to stop the fallout. Prime Video had planned a promotional videoconference for the second season of "Clarkson's Farm," which begins airing February 10 barring more changes. Execs canceled the videoconference not long after Clarkson posted another apology earlier this week. It's said the streaming service will follow through with Clarkson shows already commissioned, but Amazon hasn't commented on the matter. If the reports are true, we'd see four more episodes of the fifth and final season of "The Grand Tour" that will run into 2024 or early 2025, and a third season of "Clarkson's Farm" that's anticipated to run in 2024.