So here’s a show I watched over the weekend. Currently airing its third season on the History channel in the US, Top Shot is a reality show based around a marksmanship competition.
I’ve watched the whole of the first season. In it, professional and amateur marksman from all over the country (and a Brit, and there’s nothing like putting a Brit in a US show to make their accent sound more ridiculous) come to compete in a competition hosted by Colby Donaldson (off of Survivor 2) for a $100,000 prize and the title of Top Shot.
The first eight episodes all worked the same way – the players are divided into two teams of two and shown a weapon from history – a variety of pistols and rifles and on occasion something a bit more interesting like a longbow or throwing knives. They’re given some time to practice with them, coached by an expert in the field, and the next day they do a challenge. The winning team is safe from elimination, the losing team must nominate two of its own to go into an elimination challenge (by shooting at targets publicly on the Nomination Range), and the loser of that challenge goes home. The final two episodes are all basically elimination challenges with the worst performer going home. In between they all get to live in a pretty house.
It’s pretty by the numbers in terms of structure then but there are a few things that make this stand out a bit. How many different variations on shooting things can there be? It basically boils down to different guns, different targets, different distances. Yet within this fairly limited scope they’ve done quite well to keep the whole thing entertaining – the nature of the challenge is hidden from the players at practice so sometimes they’ll throw in things like memory (there’s usually some spurious reason like in the heat of battle it might mean the difference between hitting friend or foe or something like that) or balance (see picture above – teams must race to stick six targets in relay fashion with throwing knives whilst the ledges get increasingly perilous). One episode has contestants trying to recreate famous trick shots from history.
The elimination challenges tend to twist things up again throwing something a little extra to the mix, like firing at targets whilst on a zipline or having contestants attempt to hit playing cards to create a poker hand. This one shown is a head-to-head challenge where contestants with one minute and forty shots must hit the targets on the post to turn them their own colour adding strategy to the mix.
Is there interpersonal drama? There is, but for the most part everyone seems to get on quite well and everyone’s got loads of respect for each other and so on – most of the time, with a few surprises, the weakest people at the team challenge tend to get voted for (there was a bit of “send me in, I must prove myself!!!” rubbish strategy at the start although that seemed to disappate). Most of the post-challenge analysis is exactly that with people being honest about their shortcomings.
Colby has a certain charm (even if he doesn’t really say or do anything outside of host mode) and he is believeable as someone who can probably handle a gun. His mannerisms and commentary have been very clearly influenced by Jeff Probst.
So season one nicely entertaining. It’s interesting that the first episode of season two suggests quite a different direction with people seemingly encouraged to bitch about each other more, but it did feature this challenge which looked like it took a while to set up – eight targets on ropes moving towards the shooter at different speeds. But also on each rope is a red “stopper”, and when the target reaches it it will drop out of play. The idea, obviously, it sot hit as many of the targets as possible before they all go. Not only a test of accuracy, but also of judgement.
So we’ll have to see if season two continues its different feel to season one. I think it’s worth a watch, and there’s just no way this would work in the UK with our different attitudes to guns. It’s already on its third season in the US though, so eprhaps there would be some scope for showing it on the History Channel in the UK.
It’s a Germany special! So sit in front of your telly or computer and grab your bratwurst:
