Chances are, if you are alive in any way, you have more than likely seen at least one episode of Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel.
When the first show aired in 2003, it featured SpecialFX experts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage taking two or more popular myths per episode and performing a series of experiments or reenactments to prove whether those myths were true, false or plausible. The pair were – at the time – joined by the ‘Build Team’ consisting of Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara (as well as several others) who originally served as the setup crew responsible for getting the experiments ready.
Over the next decade, the build team graduated from setting up those experiments to busting their own myths with their own Mythbusters segments alongside Jamie and Adam. Some of the more popular episodes include ‘Knock Your Socks Off’ (in which the team used 500Lbs of explosives to try to knock the socks off a mannequin and instead broke residential windows – failed) and ‘Cannonball Chemistry’ (the team sent a cannonball through the side of a house, which landed inside of a minivan in a residential neighborhood without killing anyone- also failed).
As time went on for the Mythbusters crew, so did the ratings. Last year’s summer premiere only garnered 1.1 million viewers, down from 2011’s spring premiere of 1.8-million and 2010’s Obama episode ‘President’s Challenge’, which drew in 2 million viewers.
To put that into perspective- Discovery’s reality show ‘Gold Rush’ captured 4.2-million viewers back in December of last year. Are ratings responsible for the loss of the build team and the return to the old/new/same format?
Who knows, unlike Diet Coke and Mentos, perhaps it’s a myth better left unsolved.
