Mythbusters creator Peter Rees says he wasn't fired because he electrocuted Adam. Lots of people were electrocuted that day.

Peter Rees offers his perspective on the creation of the iconic show and what really led to his ouster.

I was taken with Mythbusters from the first episode I saw. It aired in Australia on SBS and very quickly it became appointment viewing for me and my friends. It was great, brainy television. But also television that appealed to my base desire to see things get blown up and damaged.

When I had the opportunity to have a chat with series creator Peter Rees, I jumped on it. He was a field producer on Australian futurism show Beyond 2000 in the 90s, but later went on to work for its production company (Beyond International), which led to creating MythBusters for the US Discovery Channel.

It’s a pretty wild chat that offers his perspective on why he exited MythBusters a third of the way into it’s initial run and how Paul Newman, David Letterman, and John Landis all play a role in his experience with the show.

Dan: Beyond 2000 is a show that I was obsessed with as a kid/ young teenager… They should still be making shows like that on the air these days.

What was your experience working on that program? And I was wondering how your thinking on that program led to the creation of MythBusters.

Peter Rees: So, I loved it. It was great. And it was my, I did my 10,000 hours there. You really had to turn things around.

I was sort of a bit of a sole operator in the sense that I was associate producer, you know, researcher initially, then associate producer, then producer. I can't remember how many years I worked on Beyond 2000, but I loved doing it.

I loved the travel. You know, even though it was like six months of the year, just got to some fantastic locations, really interesting stories. It was actually based on real facts… it didn't really contribute so much to MythBusters except that, you know, it was science-based.

From that point, I continued to do science-based material for Discovery Channel largely. And The Learning Channel as it was at the time, it wasn't called TLC. It actually featured science documentaries.

You said that you didn't think that working on Beyond 2000 necessarily led to your thinking on MythBusters, but when I think about MythBusters and know that your origins are with Beyond 2000, it makes all the sense in the world to me. Beyond 2000 was kind of a TV studio based program where they're going external and exploring issues of science and futurism… MythBusters furthered that.

What I was actually trying to do with MythBusters was to use reality style storytelling techniques, because reality programs were really just starting to hit.. and use those to tell real scientific stories.

I had also made a series of one-off documentaries between Beyond 2000 and when MythBusters came along on a range of increasingly out-there topics from intentional cranial human deformation to Ball Lightning - I would always find a way scientifically to debunk the stuff. You just look in detail and you go through all of the people who have theories and if they have experiments and you go and film 'em. Then you let the audience kind of reach a conclusion.

Peter Rees

How did you actually go about pitching MythBusters? What was your original conception of the idea? If you could tell us a little bit about the development process.

Okay. So, I knew my client inside out. I knew what Discovery Channel was interested in - the kinds of things that they would do.

We would even have just for fun little pitching con contests where we'd throw around ideas… just titles for shows. I remember we had like ‘Concrete: The Hard Stuff.’

Then we had another one called ‘Stings, Fangs, and Spines’. That actually turned into a five part series, which I directed. And then I kept coming up with ideas.

The idea for MythBusters evolved out of those projects that I was making, the places that I was visiting, and the styles of storytelling that were starting to starting to appear.

And also a desire to not be telling Yeti stories.

When we pitched MythBusters, initially, it wasn't called MythBusters. It had another name and it was basically like the other shows that had been to air, which were, you know, just retelling the stories and dramatising them or whatever else. We got a response back from Discovery saying “No, we need to have more transformation”.

And this was from a guy called Sean Gallagher, an executive producer there who sadly died within the last month. Sean was incredibly trusting and insightful.

So that's where this idea just came into my mind and literally summed up with a single line, as all good ideas are: We don't just retell the legends, we put them to the test.

MythBusters became a brand in itself pretty quickly, which is different to the sort of programming Discovery was doing back then. I was wondering when you realised that you actually had locked into something that was becoming its own brand?

Wow. That's an interesting question which I don't really have an interesting answer for because I was just so consumed with making it. I didn't really realise. I was directing it, I was coming up with all of the experiments. I was designing. I had cast the show. I was outlining all the experiments after we'd filmed them for the editing, which was done back here in Australia.

I didn't really have much of a chance to really think about the brand. I suppose really the first time was getting feedback on what was then a very young Internet and you started getting people on the forum. I used to make Jamie and Adam go on the forums and answer the criticism on each show.

I said: “This is how we build our audience. We respond to these people, that's our audience. They wanna know, they think we've made a mistake, we need to be able to respond to them”. And it's when that started happening that I thought that we were sort of really onto something.

Despite what Adam says, it was a science show from day one that didn't evolve into a science show. It was always a science brand. As I started getting people engaging online, I was like: “this is fantastic”.

When we first became a brand was when we did the Letterman show.

To this day, I don't understand why we did that. They were pushing for us to do it for months and we just had so much pressure on us to get the show made. I was like, when are we gonna have the time to go to New York? And what are you offering us in return?

This is just some guy who, you know, kind of sucks the life out of people on their way up and then denigrates them on the way down. That's not what something that I really wanna be a part of. But then Discovery was putting the pressure on. Adam had grown up with Letterman and he absolutely sort of wanted to do the Letterman show. In the end we got stiffed a little bit because they wanted to do an experiment in the street and we offered them all kinds of things, but no, they wanted to lift someone in a set with a set of party balloons above the street.

They promised us that it would be one of our guys and he'd be talking to Dave at the time. In the end what happened was exactly what I anticipated: they put Paul Newman in the hot seat. I was this close to Paul Newman as he said to Dave: “Oh Dave, I don't wanna steal your stunt”.

I just wanted to say: “You're stealing our stunt. Not fucking Dave's. What does this do for us?” And Discovery's answer to that was, if you've done Letterman, you've made it. And I was stumped. I was like: “I don't care about Letterman. It's not where our audience is coming from.”

I should also point out right from the start that I am not a business person. I'm not a marketing person. I'm a creative storytelling person and I believe stories drive audience engagement.

One of the things that I think really made MythBusters pop was the casting. When I looked at those guys initially, I couldn't help but think, and this is the Australian perspective on it coming through, back to The Curiosity Show from back in the day.

What I liked about The Curiosity Show was that you had two guys, Dean Hutton and Rob Morrison, who, both of them didn't really seem like they were like good mates coming into the show. It sort of seemed as though they were two science teachers who just sort of found each other in the staff room.

I felt very much the same way about MythBuster. It didn't really seem like Adam and Jamie were good friends going into it. Instead it was like two colleagues that just kind of found their way into just being strong colleagues.

So that's another one of the myths of MythBusters. It’s a myth that they didn't know each other beforehand and they weren't friends and they didn't socialise. That actually wasn't strictly speaking true. Adam, I first worked with in 1995 on my very first Beyond 2000 shoot. Jamie was managing a model special effects shop and Adam was an intern there.

They just kept in touch and Jamie would tinker away and gradually collected all that crap that was in the MythBusters shop. He eventually brought from other companies that closed down all the tools and the airplanes on the ceiling and all those kinds of things.

He didn't necessarily work on those projects, but every now and then he'd do something for fun. Like he built himself a pair of sandpaper, roller skates. And he would get on the phone to Adam and say “Adam, you know, I've got something here that you might be interested in seeing.”

And then Adam would go down and then they'd both muck around with these belt sander rollerskates. That was the nature of their relationship. I should also add that Jamie is not overly effusive. Jamie is not a social person.

He doesn't really wanna socialise with anybody. So, if anything, Adam played a bigger part of his life prior to MythBusters than anybody else. I think I went to dinner once at his place during the entire five years that I worked on the show and he would never come out to dinner with us when the crew went out and we would be celebrating something. He'd go home and whatever.

They totally knew each other. They totally shared ideas and when they built things, they'd get together and they'd tinker and talk about stuff. I think Adam would use Jamie's shop periodically. The story that they didn't know each other prior to MythBusters is not really… that's busted.

Okay. Well, we're mythbusting MythBusters. So obviously a figure like Jamie's not the kind of guy that usually gets a TV show. So what was it like pitching him at Discovery and how receptive were they to him?

My memory of this was we did a casting call-out, tried to look for people in Australia actually - to try and make it cheaper. But at that time we just couldn't connect with or couldn't find people who had the kind of resources that I knew that you could get in the United States.

I'd met Jamie back in 1995. I knew he could absolutely build anything from anything. He was weird looking, which worked for television. He was, you know, a great foil to Adam. He did suggest that “I wouldn't make a good TV presenter, but I've got a friend who might. That was Adam, of course.”

We had another group in Los Angeles who did this fantastic casting tape where they fired the other one across their lot in a refrigerator. But when Discovery saw Jamie and Adam, they just said yes straight away.

I don't know if this is a hundred percent true, but my memory of this was they (Discovery) said (about Jamie and Adam): “Yep, exactly what we need: two homosexuals from San Francisco.”

What they were saying was, yes, these guys look weird. Yes, Jamie is monosyllabic, but Adam is a great foil for Adam. Also remember, we had next to no money. The show was made, I think, for about $225,000 per hour. So Jamie also provided a space to work in that looked really cool.

He had the tools to do it. He had the materials to do it. We had a home base straight away. As soon as we took Jamie on board and Discovery saw that in the audition tape that Jamie and Adam did. I think they understood how the dynamics of that would work.

So, um, uh, in subsequent audience testing. It sort of, that I am aware of. It proved that the audience weren't that keen on Jamie, but I think the duo was what sort of, as you said before, you know, with the Australian shows that we know, um, and love and our science shows, um, it's the duo that sometimes works and the duo helped to split the workload 'cause the workload was diabolical, you know?

What you talk about there sort of speaks to what I like about them as presenters, which is authenticity. And so when you actually think about operating out of Jamie's actual sort of workspace, it really builds that authenticity into the entire framework of the show.

Absolutely. And authenticity has been the hallmark of everything that I've tried to do. That was an absolute cornerstone of MythBusters.

Jamie would be like “Why aren't we getting other people in to build this stuff for us?” And I was like “Because it's not about that. It's about you trying and failing and then overcoming adversity and getting the right conclusion.

“It’s about seeing you in that process and authentically seeing you in that process. And if you look at the Internet now, think about how much.. I'm not claiming that I created this genre on the Internet… But think about all the things that we did. All the people that are on the Internet now doing science experiments and shooting guns into ballistics gel and - there's so many programs and most of them are all very authentic.

Obviously the team on the show grew pretty quickly. You had Grant, Kari, and, Tori joining the show. What was the decision making to bring this additional second generation of MythBusters into the show? And did that come from as authentic a place? Was there a casting process involved with those guys?

No, I wanted to have Kari in… she's actually in episode one. She was that early and working in the shop, I wanted to keep her for any subsequent season to work with Jamie and Adam because she really got under Jamie's skin. I thought they would be a great trio, but at the time the executive producer of Discovery was like: “I'm not having that bitch on our show.”

The original three we brought in were Kari, Tory, and Scottie Chapman. Scottie was a real.. she actually had welding qualifications, which is something I should also add.

NOTE FROM DAN: A fun fact about Scottie Chapman - in 1991 she played in a band called Fuzz which kind-of evolved into the band Weezer.

Nobody who worked on the show had any kind of qualifications to be doing what they were doing. That was all self-taught and Scottie actually did have the qualifications.

But we were also working to get the show done. We very quickly went from a three episode pilot to 13 episode series to 23 episode series with additional specials added, including Shark Week.

We did a Hollywood special and we just couldn't handle the sheer volume of content that we had to produce. I was always trying to trim it down. Why do we need to do three stories per hour? We're doing all this really interesting work.

Can we do two stories per hour? Can we do one story per hour? Funnily enough, the more I did that, the higher the ratings went. Because people loved the detail - it's something that goes totally contrary to television wisdom, but people loved that detail.

In it’s original form, with the three episodes per hour, we were all a foreign crew. We could be worked 10 hour days, six days a week.

Originally they were called the Build Team because they were gonna come in to try and share some of the building. But then it just became increasingly obvious that… let's just separate them off and let them do their own own thing. To get more Jamie and Adam in the show, I would get Jamie and Adam to come over to where they were to look at the outcome of an experiment that they designed.

It was just purely practical.

What eventually saw your exit from the show?

My exit from the show came in an interesting way.

Everyone on the internet claims that I left the show because I electrocuted Adam and was immediately sacked as a result of it.