“Mythbusters” (Discovery, 9 p.m.) opens its 10th season with something sillier than usual: testing the actual applications of scenes from “The Simpsons,” with its producer Al Jean on hand.
“We recognize that it’s a cartoon,” co-host Adam Savage told reporters at a session of the TV Critics Association winter press tour this week, “No one really needs to know whether or not the toilets in Springfield exploded when Bart throws a cherry bomb.
“But, he added, “the idea of what you think might happen with what actually will happen is the tension that builds every narrative of every ‘MythBusters’ episode. And there’s a genuine ‘We’re not sure what’s going to happen, so let’s try it out.’
“We did sift through dozens and dozens of different things that ‘The Simpsons’ has done to find stuff we thought we could show a positive as well as a negative in order to be able to compare stuff,” Savage says. “We’re not going to do something like how many donuts can Homer eat, because Homer is fictional. But we felt that we built a reasonable episode to explore some genuine science in there.”
His co-host Jamie Hyneman chimed in: “even though it’s a cartoon and even though, yeah, the initial reason we were looking at it was because it was a popular show, some of the stuff we investigated along the way was actually quite exciting and rewarding.
“At its core,'” Hyneman added, what we do in ‘MythBusters’ is we turn science into an adventure. So that means that you set off down a certain path that you don’t necessarily know where it’s going to lead, and so we found, through the course of all these 12 years of doing these shows, that we can take something as we can take just about anything and launch ourselves down that path, and the process of investigation actually can be incredibly rewarding.”
It’s also the kind of party to celebrate their 10th season anniversary. Or, as Discovery Channel president Rich Ross put it: “Twelve years, 960 myths and legends, 516 of them busted — including President Obama’s challenge to test Archimedes’ Solar Death Ray.”