These days, with Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Mystery Science Theater no longer on the air, there aren't too many shows I absolutely have to watch every time it's on. But Mythbusters is one of the current shows I can't miss.
This show on the Discovery Channel is all about proving or disproving urban myths. You know, those things people send you in email about goldfish having a 3 second memory (which is false) or about duck quacks having no echo (also false). The hosts are Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, the odd couple of the special effects world. Jamie is meticulous and calm and Adam is wilder and more excitable. Basically, Jamie is the left brain and Adam is the right brain.
The format of each myth is to duplicate the circumstances of the myth to see if it would be possible as stated in the myth, then to duplicate the results of the myth, by seeing what circumstances it would take to create the results of the myth. For example, there is the myth of the guy standing on a boom lift, which he is using to lift the engine out of his car. The engine falls off, and the guy is supposedly launched 200 feet over his house and into the neighbors' yard. When they attached an engine to the boom lift, and dropped it, the crash test dummy, Buster, merely jiggled and didn't even drop his coffee. So then they replicated the results by building an elaborate rig to turn the boom lift into a trebuchet and launch the dummy.
The building of things and the frequent explosions and bum fires are all very nice, but the real reason to watch is the two characters running the show. Adam and Jamie are hilarious. Jamie is the stoic one, but there is nothing cuter than when he gets excited about something, like the episode where he's trying to build a personal jet pack. Adam is always funny. He manages to injure himself in nearly every episode, including sticking his lips into a running vacuum cleaner motor and telling Jamie to shoot him in the butt with a modified staple gun that shot pennies.
I love learning things, and I'm a natural skeptic, so I love applying science to these urban myths. I love that these guys are telling the world that they shouldn't believe everything they hear. I have known people who mock Christians for believing that God created the universe (based on 5000 years of religious history), but will blindly believe that the military has created a weapon based on a tone that makes people poop, just because they read it on the internet or heard it from someone whose cousin's best friend saw it once. People need to think about what they believe and why.
The Mythbusters teach solid science with practical applications. We see them succeed and we see them make mistakes. It's a show where you laugh and you learn. My favorite kind of show.
