I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it until I go blue and die: I love Mythbusters. In fact, I don’t just love it, I rely upon it. Because it’s always on, and it’s always entertaining, Mythbusters has become a televisual safety net for me, a mechanism that stops me tumbling down into the dark wastelands of the EPG that consist of nothing but milf porn and Gems TV. Until today, I assumed that Mythbusters was about as good as it got.
However, I am but a simple man, and my imagination is weak. When I watched Mythbusters, I only saw a fun, pop-factual series about two men blowing things up in the name of science. But when US television executives watched Mythbusters, they saw the inspiration for a new, scripted drama series about two men blowing things up in the name of world peace. Incredibly, that exact show is now being developed.
The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that the show – executive-produced by the Mythbusters presenters and written by some of the people behind Fringe – has received a script commitment from CBS. According to the piece, it will revolve around “two Hollywood special-effects artists who are recruited by the CIA to complete seemingly impossible covert-ops missions by creatively using the most basic tools from their craft”.
It sounds as if it’ll be part-McGyver, part-FX: The Art of Illusion and – if the main characters retain the basic characteristics of the Mythbusters hosts – part-2 Stupid Dogs. Look me in the eye and tell me that doesn’t sound like the greatest television programme ever made.
This news has convinced me that the act of taking a successful factual show, stripping it bare and recrafting it as a scripted drama is nothing less than genius. I desperately want the Mythbusters CIA series to become a success, because that’ll open the floodgates for dozens of imitators, each more incredible than the last.
Imagine if, instead of sacking Jeremy Clarkson, the BBC had ended Top Gear and used the space to create a new drama series about three policemen – a violent policeman, a long-haired policeman and a smaller policeman who has been banned from buying his own clothes thanks to his vast and sustained lack of judgment – who caught criminals by driving hilariously customised cars around Vietnam and being a bit racist. Wouldn’t that be good?
Or if Caroline Quentin’s Restoration Home became a spooky ghost story about a couple trying to fix up a haunted mansion while being plagued by apparitions who all have voices that sound like 90% of advert voiceovers? Or if Masterchef became a hard-hitting series about a man who has to cook a two-course dinner for a 100-strong historical reenactment society in a field, on time, or else the queen dies?
Or what if The Great British Bake Off became an old-fashioned, innuendo-filled sitcom where the same ideas were slowly ground into dust week after week for years on end until you ended up hating yourself for watching it? Oh, actually, that one already exists. It’s ’Allo ’Allo. And, for that matter, it’s also essentially what The Great British Bake Off already is now.
The possibilities are endless. David Starkey could become a superhero. Arg out of Towie could become the new Singing Detective. Cake Boss could actually assume some of the organised crime credentials he clearly wishes he had in real life. They could all be amazing, but they all rely on the Mythbusters lot getting it right. Fingers crossed they stick the landing.
