I enjoyed the quick-fire sections before the news. Rather than dragging out one big segment to make the point, they covered it with three seperate parts; the supercar race, the m3/prius challenge and the conclusions and advice in the news. Splitting what was one 'point' across those three seperate mini-parts made it feel like there was a lot more there, which i guess is what Mr.Willman was referring to when he said he was switching to more short and sweet segments. That bit worked well.
The news was fine, i thought the picture was ******, since the shape vaugley looks like a person bending over, but the background colour doesn't match (not that i'm an expert on the composition of ****** or anything...)
The stunt... yeah bit of a damp squib. I would have preferred it if the stunt guy had been a real comic style character like the stig, with his own type of overalls and helmet. Some kind of gimmick, other than a padded racing suit. I actually thought the writers would cut back on the number of stunts, since if you've seen half a dozen, you've really seen them all. We'll see how the stunt segments evolve.
You're all complaining that the Ferrari review was the same formula, but really be fair, how many different ways are there to say "i was suspicious of the car at first, but it's awesome"? Not many. He can't just go babbling in a non-sequitur fashion just so you don't feel like there are any similarities. The engine noise was better than usual (i ranted somewhere else about how they should improve it), but it wasn't edited right. Jeremy would mention how good it sounds, then you'd get the clean sound of the car reving, but then instead of letting you hear a gear change and more revving, they'd edit Jeremy's voice back in. There was no more than about 3 seconds of engine noise uninterrupted. Not really enough to get a good feel for it. That's a small thing, but it's a car show for car enthusiasts, so they should keep in mind what gets car enthusiasts excited.
The stars are catching a lot of flak, but be fair, the interview was a lot shorter than they usually are. Maybe they realized how annoying that queen's voice is so they decided to keep it short. Be realistic; there are always going to be some crap stars. They have to book guests for every show, there are going to be ones that hit and ones that miss. Whether the guest is exciting is the thing they have the least control over when making the show.
The police car segment was just pretty good up until Jeremy started using his wheel spikes, then it was fucking hilarious. Nice camera angles for that bit.
I always find it hard to attach a rating to top gear episodes because i'm not sure how much i'm judging it relative to itself or relative to other shows. I'd rather watch all episodes in a series, then put them in order. Looking forward to the GT-R.
*Edit* Haha, g0atse is censored on the forum.