I'm not sure how many of you actually venture away from CNN and C-SPAN but the Discovery Channel is a channel I visit on a daily basis for various shows but one of my favorite shows on the Discovery Channel is MythBusters.  I've watched it from its inception about 5 years ago.  MythBusters throws together many elements that makes a great show and keeps it educational.  Jamie and Adam are a great duo full of likable characteristics with a great sense of science.  Even everyone in their younger crew - Tori, Grand and Kari - has a great personality and strives to base their experiments off of the fundamentals of science.  Needless to say, this crew just does a superb job in entertaining and educating. 

So when I started to see commercials for Smash Lab it definitely peaked my interest because of the large impacts, collisions and explosions that were shown in their commercials.  Though I knew nothing with the same basic idea as MythBusters could be as good as MythBusters I was still hoping that Smash Lab would be an entertaining and educational show.  I was way off!  Smash Lab is a joke of a show and should be an embarrassment to those who decided to even show it along side all of the great programming available on the Discovery Channel.  The crew is not likable at all and their credibility is automatically called into question when you see the intro credits where they label each person.  The girl on the show is simply labeled as a scientist.  Based on the few episodes I've seen I would assume she's a "computer scientist" who formerly worked at Best Buy because none of what she's done has been impressive at all or even seemed scientific.  When she does say something about physics or something about mathematics it sounds overly scripted and doesn't quite sound like she knows what she's talking about.  I honestly haven't seen her partner on the show do anything worthwhile... he's always welding, driving or doing something else that serves no interest.  The two lead guys in the show make me want to shoot myself with their metro haircuts and spoiled rich guy attitudes. 

Speaking of rich - this show must have some kind of outrageous budget because of the materials these guys bring on to build useless items.... which is the premise of the show.  Instead of testing myths with the scientific method, they try to come up with solutions to real world problems.

Every solution they approach is a ridiculous idea.  The most recent episode that I watched and paid attention to was the show where they were trying to create a device to slow down or stop a suspect in a police chase.  The first thing they came up with was the idea that CO2 from fire extinguishers shot into the air intake of a car shuts down the car due to the decrease in oxygen flow which is required for an internal combustion engine.  Now I'm sure some people may not have known that you can do this but it really wasn't educational to me but let's continue assuming most people didn't know how an internal combustion engine worked.  Ok so now you've learned 1 element of a car's engine, now what?  Now we'll learn that it only takes 14% CO2 in the air mixture to shut down an engine or something.  This part I actually liked because it seemed like they were starting to approach the problem logically and scientifically.  But then again it seemed like a waste of time and they knew it by admitting that they couldn't do much with the results with the device they were building so it was all just a big waste of time.

They should have just stopped the whole fire extinguisher idea right there and approached the problem differently but they continued by building some improbable, unrealistic solutions to their problem such as throwing some large magnetic device onto the perpetrator's car while going 70mph which - thankfully - they gave up on after a couple trials.  The younger SL crew was able to prove that it was possible to stall the car's engine going at 30mph from a distance of 10 feet (I think) using a giant extinguisher with a cone-shape nozzle.

But low and behold they go on to ORDER a robotic prototype (MythBusters would have built their own) to attach to the back of a car which extended using a remote control from said car.  The idea behind it was that the police car would extend the arm in front of the perpetrator's car and then CO2 from some tanks in the trunk would be shot out from a nozzle at the end of the robotic arm.

Needless to say, their plan failed miserably at 60mph as they strayed from the working "model" with their ridiculous robotic arm.  I don't think they even tried stalling a car engine using the robotic arm with a parked car.

Even if their idea did work, it probably wouldn't work.  Here's why, they assume that all cars have an air intake right behind the grill which is untrue... most have them around the wheel well to gather a colder air flow.  And then there is the obvious reason - who is going to let a cop car pull up in front of you and extend a robotic arm in front of you as you're trying to run from the cops?  Wouldn't most people hit the cop car, speed up, break the extended arm, etc?

Anyway, that is just one of their episodes.  Another recent one I saw had the objective of building a boat seat that would eject the driver in the event of a collision.  They had some decent ideas but didn't approach the tests correctly and their remote ejection system didn't even work because it wasn't tested before doing the live run.  So they smashed the boat into another boat and shook their heads in shame as they went on to repair the boat for the next run.

I could go on and on about the other episodes I've seen but I don't want to bore you all.

I hate the show and can't wait until it drops off of the Discovery Channel.  Hopefully they replace it with something worthwhile.