Tag: The Crew

Trailer for Netflix’s new NASCAR comedy with Kevin James makes the show look… not great

If fans of Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive were looking for something comparable about NASCAR, this isn’t it.

Netflix has a new comedy series about NASCAR debuting next month, and, based on the trailer the streaming service released Friday, it looks… not great.

If fans of Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive — a captivating and in-depth docuseries about the people, intricacies and politics inside F1 — were looking for something comparable about NASCAR, this isn’t it.

Starring Kevin James, The Crew is set to premiere on February 15, one day after NASCAR’s season-opening Daytona 500, and it’s a 10-episode series, Deadline reported back in December. Per NASCAR, James plays a crew chief for a complacent fictional team, Bobby Spencer Racing, and things get complicated when the team’s owner hands control over to his daughter, who’s looking to modernize the team and raise its season expectations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAj4FnUhGWE&feature=emb_title

In all honesty, The Crew looks like a combination of the King of Queens and the roughest of rough drafts of a scene in Talladega Nights that was rightfully abandoned for lacking any humor or satire.

The premise of The Crew seems reasonable enough for a NASCAR show because there’s often a clash between drivers’ and teams’ old-school ways of operating and the innovation of the future. But between the flat jokes and the effort it takes just to get through the trailer, the show looks far from appealing.

James plays an apathetic crew chief whose expectations are probably too low even for a backmarker team, and he appears entirely unbothered by his similarly lazy and idiot driver who gets distracted mid-race by a cloud that looks like Abraham Lincoln.

Just in the trailer, the team’s incompetency feels like an over-used punchline that’s supposed to keep viewers entertained and laughing. And you’ll know when to laugh, of course, because the audience’s chuckles — and not a laugh track, as the showrunner noted — will tell you.

The biggest positive takeaway is that the show will emphasize NASCAR as a team sport, rather than encouraging a common misconception that it’s an individual one.

To be fair, it’s challenging to judge the quality of an entire show off the 135-second trailer, so perhaps this assessment is premature. However, a trailer is supposed to advertise and intrigue people enough so that they eagerly stream the show when it’s released. The Crew‘s trailer really doesn’t accomplish that.

We’ll still give it a chance when it’s released, but some fans didn’t seem too impressed by the trailer either and had mixed reactions.

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