Top Gear for gadgets

In two weeks, Gizmodo and Boing Boing Gadgets alumnus Joel Johnson is going to be on the telly with a new gadget show.

But there's one area of media that gadgets haven't yet conquered from the inside out: mainstream television. And that's why I'm tickled to finally be able to share with you the culmination of over two years of work between the team at Gizmodo and BBC America: the debut of our first hour-long television special, "Gizmodo: The Gadget Testers," on Monday, March 18th, 2013 at 10:20PM ET.

He'll be joined by Veronica Belmont, Greg Foot and O.J. Borg, with Joe Brown and Nerdist's Chris Hardwick reviewing the toys: "I certainly wouldn't have thought we'd get this chance when I was a fat, smart-ass little blogger sitting in my apartment a decade ago stuffing my face with cheap Chinese food."

• [Joel Phillips]

  UK top gear or US top gear?

  • [Lotney]

    In other words: Will it have a soul?

  • [Marc Mielke]

    Kind of sounds like this UK show, with less Fry.
    http://www.channel4.com/programmes/stephen-fry-gadget-man

    • [McGreens]

      And this UK show, with less flat caps:
      http://www.channel5.com/shows/the-gadget-show

  • [Dan Hibiki]

     Well it’s Gizmodo so… is there a North Korean Top Gear?

    it’s like that but apple centric.

• [morcheeba]

  I’m looking forward to watching them buy stolen goods and reviewing them. Nope, between beating the iPhone “antennagate” drum incessantly (10 posts about it on one day, 2/day for a week), and failing to control the trolls on their message boards, I walked away from that site a long time ago. It is a broken brand, in my opinion.

• [SedanChair]

  A gadget show peppered with smug Tory-isms? I can scarcely contain myself

• [eastblock]

  Yeah! A new smartphone that looks like all other smartphones but is 0.01mm thinner and therefore you must have it now! I can’t wait……(actually, I won’t)

• [Esca Beloved]

  Tool Time!

• [Michael Mercer]

  I look forward to Joel Johnson’s show w/ BBC on gadgets!  I think alot of audio breakthroughs have been overlooked in the past few years for, as stated above, smartphones and everything else phone-related.  

  The cost of entry into high performance audio has been blown to pieces with the explosion and high end personal audio!  I’m not talking BeatsByDre or just SOL Republic (though they make surprisingly decent headphones – SOL Republic that is).  I’m talking about companies like Audeze – who’s products have been covered here before.

  Just look at Head-Fi.org for proof of how big that scene is getting.  As a proud member of Head-Fi, and having been a writer covering both high end audio and music for close to 20 years – I’m eager to see what constitutes a “gadget” on this upcoming show!!

• [Kimmo]

  I wish the show well, but you might wanna hold off invoking Top Gear until it’s swept the world.

  • [Joel Johnson of Mars]

    Let me dream!

• [robuluz]

  Some say he’s already drafting a tell-all novel….

  http://inspiredessex.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/top-gear-stig-flash-memory-stick.jpg

• [alexb]

  So a bit like The Gadget Show then… http://gadgetshow.channel5.com

  • [Veronica Belmont]

    Hey! Having hosted one and seen the other, I can say that it’s really nothing like The Gadget Show. It’s a different take.

• [Aaron Gilliland]

  How timely.  I dumped Gizmodo from my RSS reader just a few days ago.  I can’t remember what it was like a year or two ago, but for months it’s been a dumping ground for no-value-added linking, mindless jingoistic fanboyism, transparent linkbaiting/trolling, and the words “Insanely” and “Amazingly” appearing in headlines on a daily basis.

  Perhaps Joel was the inanimate carbon rod keeping Gizmodo’s suck-core from reaching prompt criticality.  Perhaps.

• [Ladyfingers]

  Until Johnson’s face is deformed by the airspeed of his new device, it will be no Top Gear.

  • [Veronica Belmont]

    You may be surprised…

• [dculberson]

  If Joel Johnson is in it, it will be awesome.