Hear That? It’s Thousands of Angry Mythbusters Fans

Hear that noise? It’s thousands of angry Mythbusters fans, yelling about the last-minute postponement of new episodes of the show. A new episode - on “viral internet videos”, of all things - was announced for yesterday evening, and heavily promoted by the Discovery Channel over the past week. Yet it didn’t air - viewers instead saw a rerun of the old “Pirates Special”. The only announcement, as far as I can tell, was this deeply-buried post on an internet forum, made around ninety minutes ahead of airtime. The announced episodes for this week and next week are postponed indefinitely; the season picks up - supposedly - on the 27th of August, with the episode previously scheduled for that time.

Why did this happen? If anyone knows, they’re not saying. The smart money, though, seems to be on ratings problems versus the Olympic Games. Despite bigwigs at Discovery having publicly stated they were going to continue airing new programming during the Olympics, that suddenly came to a stop last night, when both Mythbusters and “Man vs. Wild” aired reruns. Is it possible that the Michael Phelps hype is producing record-breaking Olympic viewership? Well, yeah. But Phelps didn’t swim last night (or rather, he did, but because of the tape delay of network coverage, he wasn’t seen swimming.) Apparently, Mythbusters aired against - wait for it - beach volleyball. I’m no ratings expert, but I suspect those two bits of programming attract considerably different demographics.

So what gives? Well, the best theory I’ve heard is that Discovery saw the rating numbers for Tuesday night, and got spooked by how badly they sucked, so “flip flopped” on their decision to air new programming against the Olympics. If that’s true, I think it fails to take into account two things: Michael Phelps was on TV Tuesday night, but not Wednesday. Also, the “big” show on Discovery Tuesday night was “Smash Lab”. Yeah, that “Smash Lab”. The one that is slightly less riveting and entertaining than, say, the most boring parts of the O.J. Simpson trial. The one that tries to be Mythbusters, only without Jamie, Adam, or Kari. (Or Mythtern Jess. Mmm, Mythtern Jess… Sorry, where was I?)

The thing about this theory - if it’s true - is that it means Mythbusters and Man vs. Wild were postponed at the last-minute, essentially, because “Smash Lab” sucks. If that’s the case, way to go, Discovery! Punish the popular shows because the sucky ones, well, suck. Gotta love the almighty advertising dollar, no?

(A fun footnote to Discovery’s last-minute bait-and-switch is that a lot of bittorrent sites got burned by automatic rips of what was supposed to be a new episode, but wasn’t - thousands of die-hard file-sharers are, even as we speak, downloading the first half of the old Pirate Special, thinking it’s an all-new Mythbusters episode. Yeah, that’s going to go over real well…)

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