Jerry Seinfeld’s formula for Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which returns to Netflix this week, is beautifully simple. Load up a car with GoPro cameras, drive one of your pals around, go and get a drink, repeat. Not every episode is a success – in the case of Christoph Waltz’s episode, it may actively stink – but it’s only 15 minutes long. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is rickety and disposable and it will probably end up being one of the definitive shows of the age.
That’s because Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is one of a clutch of beloved car-cam shows. Peter Kay’s final Car Share special in May was so breathlessly anticipated that the whole thing barely even bothered with a story. When James Corden unveiled a Carpool Karaoke segment that he shot with Paul McCartney last month, people were effusive to the point of hysteria. On paper, it sounded dreadful – Corden bellowing over a selection of beloved songs while McCartney told a procession of well-honed anecdotes – but people reacted with joy.
A lot of this has to do with the setting. Cars are private spaces. They are small and intimate. They also require great concentration on the part of the driver, which adds a slightly distracted tenor to any conversations that happen within. This offhand nature allows people to open up in ways they would not in a more traditional setting.
To return to the McCartney Carpool Karaoke for a moment, try to imagine how unbearable it would have been if it had taken place within a traditional talkshow arena. Imagine James Corden, microphone in hand, witlessly duetting McCartney’s new single between rehearsed reminiscences about life in Liverpool in front of a fawning studio audience. It would have been woeful. It would have been Alan Partridge. Being in a car helped to humanise the pair of them.
Not that this is a particularly new phenomenon, of course. Television producers have been putting cameras in cars for decades, ever since the mid-90s, when the BBC created one of the world’s first reality stars in Driving School’s quivering, incompetent Maureen Rees. Carpool Karaoke can probably be traced back to a clip of Peter Kay and Paddy McGuinness belting out the Minder theme tune in a van at the turn of the century, while Car Share owes a very clear debt to Rob Brydon’s 2000 series Marion and Geoff.
As for Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, that’s a little more contentious. Its premise is so deceptively simple that people are lining up to take credit for it. Robert Llewellyn’s Carpool preceded Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee by three years and has such a similar premise – the host has a conversation with a celebrity in a car – that it reportedly caused Llewellyn’s agent to look at their legal options. Meanwhile, more recently, the director of the Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee pilot is now claiming that the idea is his and is filing a lawsuit of his own.
The latter case is particularly interesting, because it has blown apart one of the biggest myths of car-cam programming. To look at one of these shows – with weird sound, jerky cameras and no sense of any kind of production value – you would think that they were done on the cheap. In fact, the opposite is true. Apple bought a Carpool Karaoke series from Corden and made it a cornerstone of its billion-dollar original content strategy. Car Share caused the revenue of Peter Kay’s production company to spike by millions of pounds. As for Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee – and this has been cited as the cause of the most recent lawsuit – Seinfeld will take home $750,000 for every 15-minute episode he makes for Netflix.
In terms of equipment, these shows may not be that expensive to make. But the cost of the talent involved is eye-watering. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee may be a passable way to spend a quarter of an hour, but when you think of the other, better shows that could be made with its budget, it seems like a tremendous waste. Enjoy you car-cam shows while you can, because the bubble can’t be far from bursting.
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee season six starts on Netflix on 6 July
