Yahoo Autos Illegal Downloads of The Grand Tour Are Dropping By Millions With Each New Episode
The Grand Tour, Amazon's version of Top Gear "in witness protection," as Jeremy Clarkson has put it, has done something incredible: The show is now the most torrented show in history. That could have been anticipated, though. Much like Top Gear, The Grand Tour isn't available to the entire globe, so people in countries that can't watch the show on Amazon Prime but need a fix of Clarkson, Hammond, and May are getting it the old fashioned way: they're stealing it.
The first episode was downloaded 7.9 million times. The second had 6.4 million downloads. And the third had 4.6 million downloads.
Those are very impressive numbers, but notice a trend there? Episode three has 3.3 million fewer downloads than episode one, that's a loss of nearly 40 percent.
There aren't suddenly 3.3 million fewer people in the world. The internet didn't go away permanently for all these people. So we have two theories why they've dropped off.
First: The show inspired all those illegal downloaders to put up the money for Amazon Prime or to pay for each episode they want to see. That one isn't likely.
Second: People stopped downloading it because the show is disappointing. That's what we think is really happening.
It hurts to say that The Grand Tour is disappointing, because we had such high hopes for it. It was the chance for the people who reinvented car TV to do something totally new and escape the format of Top Gear that had become monotonous and too scripted for its own good.
The previews for the show looked incredibly positive, with Amazon billing it as one big adventure and shot out of a traveling tent. I thought that instead of short films and bits, we'd be getting a massive 12-week long film with all the challenges interlinked. A true Grand Tour.
Instead, we got Top Gear in a tent, except with a track that isn't as good, a race car driver that's more of a bad comedy act than the icon that was The Stig, scripted hijinks that aren't funny, and a celebrity killing scene in each show that is somehow worse than Star in a Reasonably Priced Car. It doesn't reinvent car TV, but that was too much to expect. The problem is that it doesn't even push it forward.
The three still have their moments that make you remember the chemistry you watch for in the first place. It still has some scenes where you think it's making a turn for the better. But the reality is that the show is stale already. And it just started.
It'll be interesting to see how downloads do for the fourth episode. If they drop again, The Grand Tour might have something in common with the newest version of Top Gear...
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