Le Mans: Racing Is Everything

I am in the middle of watching this series. I have not followed Le Mans, but knew it was a 24 hour torture test for both man and machine. I was amazed at some of the details that they went into concerning use of cutting edge technology and method of choice and training for the drivers. There was also a bit of history thrown in. The cinematography and editing were to my liking. I think I will go out of this knowing a whole lot more than I did going in.

This could have been a great series - the photography is excellent, the interviews with drivers and crews are fun and informative, and the exploration of the differing technologies within the competing cars is fascinating. Unfortunately, the series was ruined by moronic, reality-TV style narration and editing. The insincere, melodramatic tones of the amateur narrators that are piped through "small radio-speaker" sound filters made me cringe every time I heard them. The choppy editing speeds up and slows down cars to try to create more drama, and draws attention to itself and away from the race. This series is a huge disappointment.

For some dumb reason, they have the woman sounding like she did her narration onto a 78 record. The record was then played back on a gramophone and the sound that came out of the horn was recorded.

Why? I have no idea.

I'm giving it a 4 because I turned the sound off and turned on closed captioning.

Also, blah, blah...Paul Newman, blah, blah, Steve McQueen. I hate when people try to justify something because famous or glamorous people like something. Good lord, these were just 2 guys that were talented in one aspect of their lives and were able to peruse a hobby that they were pretty good (or very good) at. They weren't f'in royalty, but at least they earned their spot as opposed to royalty who won the sperm lottery.

Generally good camera work and colour grading - just a shame that the rest was, at times, an incoherent and inconsistent mess:

* The introduction for each episode was like it was for a different series - as this is an Amazon/Prime series I kept on thinking I needed to skip the preview of an unrelated series only to realise that they were the actual intros for this series * I guess what was an attempt to capture audiences from different countries/regions meant there was an inconsistent feel to the voice-over accents with a mix of North American and British accents that at times left doubt as to whether you were watching to same program rather than have a single, consistent narrator (see below for more) * The pseudo race announcer/radio commentary was appalling and killed the series from beginning to end - it was obviously an attempt to create some form of narrative after the fact, however one feels that the exposition would have been better served with text overlays supported by the score/music to create the drama and with a single, consistent narrator/voice-over where necessary * As for the graphics, they looked pretty nasty and again lacked overall uniformity * Finally to the subtitles - at times there were subtitles overlayed to the in-car comments and perhaps more difficult to understand audio recordings, yet whole sequences in French and German did not have subtitles meaning one either needed to turn closed captioning on or off in order to follow those scenes...

Overall, it could have been a great series, and the drama around the 24-hour race could have been achieved with a more simplistic and consistent approach to how the narrative was constructed instead of using annoying pseudo race announcers/radio commentary that felt more suitable to a Bio Shock or Fall Out 3 video game.

I don't follow Le Mans racing but used to watch Formula One racing growing up. This is a really good series in my regard. I especially like how the different drivers are interviewed and how the main gist of the race is shown. Unlike others, I found the editing style a good addition. Hopefully, this returns for another season.