Greatest American Road Side Trip

The third episode of NBC’s reality series “The Great American Road Trip” turned out to be slightly better than its predecessor — namely because it didn’t have a repeat of the dreadful talent show in Branson.

However, the show found other ways to dismay and irritate. Namely …

— For all the ballyhoo about it being on Route 66, the families seemed to spend precious little time on the Mother Road. Side trips on Monday included Independence, Kan.; Sudan, Kan.; and Pawhuska, Okla. — all of which are at least 60 miles from Route 66.

Folks on the Mother Road in Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma probably felt shafted. “Great American Road Trip” either bypassed those regions, or the footage wound up on the cutting-room floor.

I will give props to the stunning Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska, where families saw buffalo grazing the natural grasslands. Tallgrass sits about an hour northwest of Tulsa, but attracts a fair (and growing) number of Europeans traveling the Mother Road. However, unlike Tallgrass, I know of no Route 66 guidebooks or articles that tout the original Little House on the Prairie or Red Buffalo Ranch to tourists.

— POPS in Arcadia, Okla., said to watch for footage of its establishment on Monday. But unless you know all its nooks and crannies, you probably wouldn’t have noticed it in the all-too-brief footage there. Another missed opportunity by the show’s producers.

— My B.S. meter goes off every time one of the Pollards talks about feeling tension from the other families. That smells of a fabricated ploy by the producers to drum up drama for a series that had precious little to start with. I sincerely doubt it was ever remotely that acrimonious between the contestants.

— The segment that spurred me to nearly throw something at the monitor was when the producers treated all the families to a big communal meal at … Applebee’s.

Any roadie could think of dozens of excellent and unique Route 66 restaurants. Instead, the contestants were dispatched to an utterly unremarkable chain. It was one the most blatant and cynical examples of product placement that I’d seen. A pox of food poisoning to the producers’ houses.

— At least the physical challenges on Monday were better (no talent show, for one thing), and the internal dynamic in the families became intriguing a couple of times.

But those small pluses don’t overcome King Kong-sized minuses in this ill-conceived program. It’s become obvious its producers did very little research on Route 66 before setting up the cameras, if they did at all. Route 66 boasts a ton of cool stuff and people, but you’d barely know that from this program.

In retrospect, one of the crucial errors was giving the families big, unwieldy RVs to drive instead of minivans or  SUVs. Smaller, nimbler vehicles would have allowed the families to traverse narrow stretches of old Route 66, such as the Sidewalk Highway near Miami, Okla., and the brick highway near Auburn, Ill. But driving those behemoths made that nearly impossible, and effectively banished the families to the interstates.

Ratings for Monday night were unchanged from the previous week. So it appears “Road Trip” isn’t bleeding any more viewers. However, it remains stuck in a distant fourth among the four major networks in its time slot, which isn’t good, either.

NBC hasn’t canceled it, so it appears the network will stick with this dog to the bitter end.