Mythbusters is a show that appeals on many levels. Science geeks can enjoy their analysis of several myths and the experimentation they try to pull it off. Inventors and idea people can marvel at the ingenious devices and experiments that they design to test the myths. Fans of explosions and destruction can revel in the many spectacular explosions, smashs and crashes the show attempts each week. And those who just like good television can enjoy the show as just good fun, silly, and occasionally enlightening entertainment.
Perhaps in an effort to capture a bit of the Mythbusters audience, Discovery Channel has premiered Smash Lab, a series that the network describes on its website as follows:
The next generation in destruction instruction, Smash Lab features a team of maverick engineers as they take on everyday technology and apply it in revolutionary new ways. First they break down the technology to see how it works and then use their know-how to see how it could be used in a different, supersized way. Could bulletproof Kevlar protect an airliner from bombs? Could a car airbag be reinvented to stop a helicopter from sinking after ditching at sea? The Smash Lab team aims to find out.
Filmed at their Crash Lab in California, the team puts their ambitious plans to the test and captures them from every camera angle imaginable. Smash Lab is a visual feast of fireballs, explosions, crashes, collapses, collisions and impacts, because sometimes destruction is good for you.
After watching a recent episode, Smash Labs proves that Mythbusters is so much more than demolition. The Mythbusters crew takes the myth, breaks it down to its components, and does some analysis about the best way to test it and their belief on how it work. And the entire show is full of little payoffs leading up to the big explosion or crash at the end.
By contrast, Smash Labs seems like a rush job designed to test one theory. In the episode I watched, the Smash Lab team tested a special type of concrete that collapses under extreme stress and weight to act as a cushion and barrier that slows down out of control airplanes on a runway. The team theorized that it could help stop crossover wrecks for cars and trucks by placing this concrete in the median of the road and/or using it as a cushion for highway dividers.
The show then shows the team crashing cars into barriers protected with this concrete, with not so promising results, and then testing a car and a bus over a lengthy stretch of the concrete surface, which results in the car skimming right across it, and the bus almost making it across, but stopping near the end.
Unfortunately, neither solution tested seems practical in the slightest. Even if it worked, the cost and look of concrete would keep communities from investing in it, especially when there are other less obtrusive and cheaper solutions such as catch barriers that are in use today. Secondly, the “real world” test doesn’t test a true crossover situation. Instead of showing the immediate shooting across the road that often happens when an accident in one lane bounces cars off in all directions, it treats a crossover like an exit ramp, with vehicles that are crossing over taking a long path toward the opposite lane, giving them plenty of time to stop in the concrete. My guess is that police and accident investigators would simply laugh at the staging of the accident.
Additionally, the cast of the show does little to distinguish themselves. A bunch of generic looking 20 and 30 somethings without much identifiable personality, separated into skills (science girl, idea guy, design guy, and engineer guy) doesn’t provide the same level of enjoyment as the well defined differences of the Mythbusters team. The entire Mythbusters team seems to add a litle of everything to the ideas presented there, and they do it with much more flair than the Smash Lab crew does now.
Of course, it’s early in the inception, so Smash Lab could develop into something more than it is now. But if the show hopes to keep its Mythbuster lead in audience, it’s going to have to put more thought and effort into its experiments.
