Sciencey Explosions- Ten Years of Mythbusters

My wife and I got into Mythbusters only a couple years ago, probably 2009 or 2010. It was before Dragon Con 2010 I know for sure, as while there we wanted to go see Adam Savage but the line stretched around three blocks by the time we found it.

Between Netflix streaming and DVRing old episodes that played constantly on Discovery, we binged on the show for awhile. Not like we would with more serial shows, which could get 2-3 viewings a night, since there’s no overarcing story to follow. But it was a nice show to sit back and not have to think about to much because we had to try and unravel deep plots.

Though, ironically, some episodes elicited more thinking and discussion despite the intention of looking for mindless entertainment. My wife’s a materials engineer and she will occasionally take issue with something they did on the show because of some material they used or some testing methodology.  This would necessitate judicious use of the pause button. I learned a lot as a result. A common one pet peeve is referring to rust as anything that doesn’t involve iron.

That is one of the things we really enjoy about the show, the bend toward learning and education. It’s on the Discovery channel, which is supposed to be about discovery and learning, but as the History Channel is now all about conspiracy theories and aliens, and Sci-FI is about wrestling, that doesn’t mean much. The stated and implied goal for the show sticks to a philosophy of seeking knowledge through experimentation.

Some of my personal favorite episodes have been the ones where they test Hollywood myths. Taking those tropes we’re all familiar with and seeing what is actually possible. I can only imagine getting to build a Bond car must have been a lot of fun. I never would have thought you could actually swim with a tuxedo under a scuba suit and come out looking ready for a party. These aren’t hard science questions but fun to know.

While doing some of these wacky experiments, the hosts actually appear to be enjoying themselves. That’s a rare thing to see, people enjoying their work. While we may have some quibbles with the actual methodology used at times, the open enthusiasm for science makes up for.

Watching this weeks 10 year anniversary episode reminded me both of things I enjoy about the show and some growing frustrations I have. First, returning to past experiments to verify results is awesome. That’s the hallmark of good science, a willingness to accept that you might be wrong. That is a philosophy more people need.

As for frustrations I have, the show is incredibly repetitive. Part of that is the nature of a tv show. That was one of the shows charms, we didn’t have to pay to much attention because things would get repeated. But in the last few seasons this repetition has gone off the deep end (jumping the shark in the process?).

For example, in the latest episode, they did a 30second count down for the launch of the first rocket car. Then they go to a commercial and reset the 30 second count down. We had to watch the same build up and the same explanation twice in a row. Maybe this is less annoying with a commercial inbetween but since watch everything streaming we’ve never seen a Mythbusters with commercials.

This got even worse as the episode progressed as each host in turn would recap the entire experiment from the top, something we had just watched happen. Quick reminders are fine but an entire recap of a pretty simple experiment was just annoying.

I understand that it’s probably hard to fill an hour show when the actual experiment is only two samples and consist of events that are done in about 10 seconds.  The repetition is not as bad when they have 2-3 different myths they’re working on and where each one has a few iterations.  But even those have gotten worse as of late.

I think they really found their stride around seasons 4 through 9. Things were repeated but not to a level that got annoying. They had abandoned the folklorist as well as trying to up play the interpersonal drama. Anytime you get more than one person working on something, you’ll have conflict, its human nature. But I’m glad they decided we didn’t need to really see any more of that.

Far less time is spent on explaining what they are doing and why or going into the actual science behind why things occur than they used too.  Instead, we’re given a summary four or five times per episode and the results are spoiled in preview clips at every commercial break. It’s hard to stay interested in discovering the results of a test if I’ve already seen the results several times.

The hosts have also seemed to lose some of their passion*. Part of that is inevitable, its hard to do something for 10 years and still appear excited and surprised on camera. I just wish they didn’t feel the need to fake it. Sometimes the playful banter comes off as a third take rather than just spur of the moment. And its a little telling that every high speed shot is Adam’s favorite in the history of the show.

Part of this, I expect, is they are victims of their own success. Doing well brings in more money but more money demands more viewers. And studio execs think people are stupid so they demand more repetition, less actual science. They want more witty banter, less scientific details.

They’ve also been able to test bigger and bigger things using more and more sophisticated equipment. Unfortunately, as cool as going to a NASA research center is, the actual hosts don’t get to do a lot of the experimenting. They could focus more on the scientists involved but, I suspect, the execs again are banking on the host personalities drawing people in, so we’re left with them explaining something several times because they can’t actually use the big machine. Or the experiment on the big machine is hard to visualize on camera. Science isn’t always friendly like that. Sometimes it’s just a boring old graph.

So I don’t know how much of the recent trends have been caused by fatigue at doing the same show for a decade, executive meddling pushing for more false enthusiasm and more repetitive explosions or just poor editing decisions. While we still enjoy the show,  I hope, if the trend is due to host fatigue, they’ll bring it to an end before they actually start hating each other or the show. If it’s meddling, hopefully they can decide to push back.

Either way, here’s to 10 fun years of science!

*Late addition: This change has coincided with the decline of ballistics gel. We use to joke that Mythbusters was single handedly keeping the ballistic gel industry in business. Haven’t seen it used in quite awhile. Correlation?