The Grand Tour’s race is run as Prime Video series films its final episode
The Grand Tour, Amazon’s spinoff series from the BBC TV show Top Gear, has finally run out of road. The streamer has filmed the show’s final episode featuring the terrible trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond.
But while it’s the end of the show for now – it never quite made our best Prime Video series list in the end – it might not be the end of the three men’s grumpy adventures. According to the BBC, “options are being explored for a new incarnation of the show.”
The trio shot to fame on BBC’s Top Gear with their increasingly epic – and increasingly silly – car-based tomfoolery, later moving to Amazon’s Prime Video in 2015 for what they described as “freedom” and news reports described as “Jeremy Clarkson punching one of the show’s producers”. The show was an early jewel in Prime Video’s crown, but it has lost some of its luster in recent years.
Why has The Grand Tour stopped?
The show has been subject to diminishing returns, which are evident in its Rotten Tomatoes ratings. Season one got 91%, dropping to 57% for season two and 60% for season three. By season five, the most recent season aired on Prime Video in 2022, even the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper whose demographic is very much the same as the show, said that “this tedious series” is “shuddering to a wheezing halt.”
The Guardian took a similar tone, describing the trio as “the patriarchy’s Cheeky Girls” and their 2021 Lochdown Scottish special as likely to boost the vote for Scottish independence from England.
Winding up the likes of The Guardian is of course what Jeremy Clarkson likes to do, so those reviews will have been seen as a good thing. But Clarkson’s appeal in particular has been waning. His other Amazon vehicle, Clarkson’s Farm, won’t be coming back after its next season either.
The end of The Grand Tour has been apparent for a while though. Back in January, Variety reported that Amazon was preparing to part ways with Clarkson, a decision already made before the presenter caused widespread outrage with an outrageous column about Meghan Markle – a column Clarkson said Amazon was “incandescent” about.
Meanwhile Top Gear, the show that made The Grand Tour trio stars, is suffering too. Just last week the BBC announced that the motoring show would not be returning “for the forseeable future” to the best streaming services.
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