I'm already watching season 4 of Mythbusters, in English. In Russian, they get dubbed as either "Legend Busters" or "Myth Busters".
It's basically a cross between a popular science documentary series and a reality TV show. It airs on the Discovery Channel in the US and under license in a few European countries. Mythbusters is actually super popular among geeks, and not just them.
The gist of the show goes like this: hosts Adam Savage (Adam Savage) and Jamie Hyneman (Jamie Honeyman) track down various legends and myths, but not just any kind — only those that carry a grain of truth, aka a kernel of reality. On top of that, the myths shouldn't blatantly contradict science and common sense, they must be reproducible, and they shouldn't require excessive resources to test, because their budget isn't bottomless after all.
Jamie and Adam in a hazmat suit
Once a myth is chosen, the showmen-tinkerers recreate the conditions of the legend in their workshop and try to reproduce the result. To make all this more fun to watch, it's interspersed with Savage's jokes and clowning around, Jamie's solid reasoning, and the ironic remarks of the voiceover narrator. Spectacular stuff like explosions, high-speed camera footage, and funny animated inserts are also quite common. There's also plenty of constant abuse and mutilation directed at a crash test dummy named Buster.
As food for thought, the show draws parallels with movies and books, gives simple physics and math explanations, and emphasizes the scientific method: theory, experiment, correction, result. The latter, by the way, can be quite unexpected even for the MythBusters themselves: they don't know the outcome of the experiments in advance either, and when a myth is successfully confirmed or just yields an educational result, they get excited in a truly American way. Especially Savage, who plays the role of a restless man-child, and is therefore constantly pulling all sorts of stupid stunts. From the looks of it, by the way, he's a born showman and would give many comedians and TV hosts a run for their money, especially the Russian-speaking ones: he's got a sharp tongue, drops metaphors left and right, and hilariously impersonates accents and dialects.
Fun fact: when Jamie was offered to do the show, he replied that he was in, but only if they brought Adam on as a co-host, because he'd get bored doing it alone. Hyneman is a big brain, and this decision was genius: an introvert and a thorough engineer, Jamie perfectly complements the quick-to-act joker Adam. Both of them, however, are excellent jacks of all trades who leveled up their skills while creating special effects for Hollywood movies: Jamie's workshop is located in San Francisco, which isn't too far from Los Angeles, right next door to the dream factory.
When the show got famous, its budget increased, and the bosses hired themselves an additional crew (Build Team) consisting of artist Kari, handyman Tory, and electronics wiz Grant. Unfortunately, another girl named Scottie, who worked with metal on the show, left for unknown personal reasons. Which made me wonder — do we, the viewers, have the right to know these reasons? I don't think so, though it would be nice. On the other hand, I once voiced the thought that people who gain fame should be prepared for the flip side of the coin, i.e., the lack of privacy. On the internet, however, rumor has it that she was fired. Possibly because the show needed the aforementioned people, and Adam and Jamie are perfectly capable of doing the metalworking themselves.
I don't remember which myth this was for, but they frequently goof around in all sorts of ways to make it look better
While writing this, I found out that the hosts themselves mentioned at one of their university appearances, which they do from time to time, that Scottie wasn't a great fit for TV. In the sense that making a show like this involves playing to the audience, explaining to the cameraman what you're doing at any given moment, trying out all sorts of spectacular variations of the exact same technical process, taking multiple takes, etc.
In principle, that makes sense, especially given the American approach of pushing everything to the max and making it grotesque. The backup build team, by the way, was pretty shy and insecure at first, but then they got used to the cameras and started rocking out just as hard as the bosses of the enterprise.
And to wrap up this post, and to spark your interest in the show – here are some myths that I found intriguing.
1. Can you get a lethal electric shock by taking a leak on the train tracks?
2. What happens if you drop a coin from a skyscraper onto a passerby's head? Will they croak or not?
3. Can a bridge be collapsed by resonance if a regiment of soldiers marches across it in step?
4. Can you make a cannon out of wood?
5. Can you wash, clean, and get the smell out of a car where a decomposing corpse has been lying for several months?
6. Is it true that Archimedes set Roman ships on fire using a system of parabolic bronze mirrors?
7. Can you launch an illegal immigrant from Mexico across the border using a catapult?
and a million more entertaining debunkings of popular culture.
You can download most of the episodes on torrents.ru in Russian, or on www.tvtorrents.com in the bourgeois lingo.