Though season two of The Grand Tour just ended, and season three has yet to begin production, Amazon has allegedly decided that the car-shenanigan trio of Clarkson, Hammond, and May will not return for a fourth season. According to The Daily Mail’s sources, the show’s leading men will all be looking for work in the near future. (Update: Amazon won’t comment, but another source cast some doubt on the report.)
After hosting 22 seasons of the BBC’s Top Gear, Clarkson was unceremoniously stripped of the position after a punch up on the job. Amazon stepped in and offered the three a new show on their Prime video service, signing a three-year multi-million dollar deal.
The first season of The Grand Tour had good moments and bad, punctuated by largely annoying Celebrity Brain Crash and The American test driver bits. (Also, how is the correlating DriveTribe social media experiment? still a thing?) By and large, however, the show did what it set out to do. After both of those segments were dropped for season two, the show was certainly an improvement, though was still clearly quite scripted.
We’ll have to wait and see what the series has in store for a third season, but it’s possible that we won’t see any more of these three on our streaming services after that. It is worth noting that Jeremy Clarkson was recently picked up as the host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in the UK, so that bit is true, but this tweet also seems to indicate skepticism in the Mail’s reporting. Whether he’s covering his own ass for continued talks with Amazon, or this is all a bit lark, we’ll have to wait and see. We have reached out to Amazon for further comment and will bring you updates as they happen.
While I’ve been more than happy to consume both The Grand Tour and Top Gear in this overlapping timeline of incredible car programming, I’m firmly in the Top Gear camp. Perhaps season three will change my mind, but right now it feels like a good time to end this experiment. Furthermore, the show needs to stop trying to kill Richard Hammond.
Update: 2:32 p.m. EST: Amazon declined to officially comment, but a source within the company indicated that this rumor might be baseless after all.