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To quote myself from the previous page on this topic:
- The very amazing locations.
- The cinematographic way of fiming, the color and the camera work is just crazy (don't know how they even menage to pull that off)
- Music (even if not new ones).
- The title sequence.
- Brian Coxx as The Controller.
- Some tests are nice : the crane climb, the moving train, the cliff climb etc...
- All the 9 episodes were out the same day (no waiting to endure).
The bad point are :
- To much repetition, nothing else about the mandatory questions. Imagine bring the candidate to a casino just for... let them answers another question. Or immagine bring other ones to a motor race track just for... travel it on foot and answers another question. And always the two same case (expected the metro one would be looking like some kind of bomb and have to cut the right cable A, B or C). At least the question aren't obviously easy.
- The disjointed aspect (you pass from a candidate to another, and to another, to go back to the first, see new one you never see, go back to the second pair, etc...). Some of them didn't have at least 5 min of screen time in the whole show. + What was the point to have a test where you have to climb at the top of a volcano but not showing any footage of the guy when he finally arrive to the top of it?
- No reference to the James Bond universe from any of the candidate (or at least no one that end up in the final edit). Nobody seems to say "oh I know this thing, it's from the X or Y [film name]", nobody seems amazed by any prop.
- The casting is "okay", but I wouldn't say "amazing".
- Why there isn't more spy stuff test, more interaction with anything.
- The obscure rules : no rules dictated to us so we wonder why they not shoot the laser gun point blank ? Ask the boats in canal just near them the speed limit ? What is allowed, what is forbidden is never clearly define.
- There should have been bad guys who misled them or chase them, some competion between the pair (like at the casino), anything to make it more thrilling that just watch them 10 min pick which random answer they would choose to a question that they don't know the answer.
- Why after incorrect the good answer is not always given to us/them ? At least you should try to edducated us.
- The obligatory typical waste of time of theses kind of tv emission : "the answers you pick is [45 second of useless wait] correct/incorrect] ".
- Strange product placement : why on any drink existed on the world would Bone brother end up to ask a Heineken in that store in Jamaica?
But is it true that the questions aren't even about Bond? One question that's asked in the Scotland scene was about Macbeth? It's that true?
Because if that's the case that's already a disappointment, because the question aren't even linked to Bond at all?
That is indeed true. I can see why, ultimately, they did it. It just opens up who you can cast as contestants to a much broader group, and I think they leaned into the idea of establishing the glamor and globetrotting of Bond rather than the character or specific stories.
Think of it this way: if you give them a Bond trivia test when casting, you erase any of those questions from being able to be used in the show, so then how do you know they are Bond fans? You could ask if they've seen most of the movies or read the books, but then they could just be lying to get on TV.
With random UK trivia, by casting reasonably educated UK citizens, you can have some reasonable expectation they can answer your vaguer trivia questions without any sort of test.
I easily see this part changing significantly in the next series, but I don't think it will ever be a Bond trivia show.
I literally just wrote:
You've invested millions in getting them and crew to location to film, and they immediately fail out because they in fact lied and don't know anything, half your contestants go home immediately, you have no show, just a comedy of errors.
Keep in mind we are talking about 14 Fleming books plus additional short stories (and do you also factor in the Fleming connection in Horowitz's latest series of continuation novels, or the continuations as a whole? no probably not), and then 25 Eon movies. Obviously not even many "fans" have probably seen every Bond movie, which could make the challenges more fun in a way, but also it's a lot of content to run trivia for! Where do you begin? How simple do you make it? The current setup of RTAM presents extremely simple questions, which probably would not even be fun for a Bond fan if the show was asking: "Who is Bond's boss?: 1. M.? 2. C.? 3. Q.?" Right?
My solution would be: specify you want Bond fans in your casting call (still not sure how you'd vet them), or hire maybe the smaller crew folks who have been hired to Bond sets, who might know this stuff. Target your casting/advertising listings to forums and fan social pages. Cast minor UK celebrities, or young prospective actors/filmmakers, where they might be somewhat more informed. They certainly could have tried to make a Bond-focused reality narrative/trivia work but it's not so straightforward.
I would enjoy a show that puts random people in very specific Bond scenes. They have to bungie jump off a dam and then do something while hanging upside down once they reach the bottom; have them walk into the Russian embassy set from FRWL with instructions to follow the map Tatiana draws in the movie, without them knowing the foundation is about to explode so they're surprised when it does, and they have to act or something; one contestant is tied to a table while the other is blindfolded, the one on the table has to guide the blind one to do something before, idk, a bucket of paint falls on them and they fail the challenge; they should at one point have to search a room for bugs/clues or a safe behind a picture, etc. get them thinking like spies. Idk.
I'd have to get Amazon Prime just for this show, and it doesn't seem worth the time.
It might prove informative to viewers not as knowledgable as you.
For fun...
Avail viewership numbers from article and some more from Barb (full list here):
8.8M: Strictly Come Dancing (Fri)
8.4M: Strictly Come Dancing (Sat)
6.9M: GBBO
6.1M: The Long Shadow
5.6M: Planet Earth III
4.3M: Clarkson Farm Ep. 1
3.8M: Clarkson Farm Ep. 2
3.3M: Clarkson Farm Ep. 3
3.2M: Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Ep. 1
2.8M: ITV Evening News
2.8M: BBC Weekend News
2.7M: The Met
2.7M>007: RTAM
More people tuned into the UK news cycle, which is sad.
More Bond vs. Tolkien:
Reported 100M copies of Fleming books sold worldwide reported in 2022.
Reported 600M copies of Tolkien books sold worldwide reported in 2021.
Reported 7B in Bond cinema sales.
Reported ~3B in LOTR cinema sales + ~3B in Hobbit cinema sales.
Instead of arriving at a destination to answer a question, how about an actual challenge along the lines of Amazing Race and Survivor? Instead of being out because one missed a multiple choice question, one is out because they failed a challenge. The shooting challenge was actually a good example, but the shooting challenge for the Bone brothers seemed more difficult than the one the Nurses did. As the camera followed the Bond brothers through the jungle, the brothers weren't carrying the hammocks they later slept in. That alone made the trek seem not quite as hard.
The series felt as if it all added up to nothing much at all. The travelogue aspect is appealing, the music wonderful, and the contestants were engaging. In the end, it left me neither shaken nor stirred.
All fair and agreeable takes, imo. It's clear to me from the producers/filmmakers language that they really did not want people clashing directly with each other in any way, and minimize as much risk of injury as possible. BB said in a roundtable that they'd been approached with more aggressive style shows setup like "triathlons" that concerned them for the contestants' safety before this, but this seemed more like a fun adventure show. So this is what they ended up with. I agree, they could do more, even within those parameters.
Maybe not right for a "Bond" show, but this could have been an opportunity to work with / cast all veterans, show some support there. And then there can be some higher expectation of physical ability/survival mentality etc.
The choice to have it not be a typically edited reality program makes you wonder what they were thinking. He said, I haven't watched so I am going entirely on his review, that really only 4 of the teams really feature in and even then one team gets most of the focus. That in some of the episodes the editing suddenly thrusts you back to Scotland to see other teams there and that it's quite jarring.
I wonder why they edited the program that way? I was envisioning a more "Amazing Race" style show with some Bond flourishes.