Discovery Channel and the Mythbusters crew have announced that the 2016 season, their 14th, will be their last.
"We didn't just love watching "MythBusters" because of the impressive explosions or because we wanted to see if the team would survive crashing cars or lighting themselves on fire for our entertainment. In a world of endless drama-filled dating shows and fluffy sitcoms, we actually learned useful things from every "MythBusters" episode. I learned, for example, that boarding an airplane back to front is the slowest method. I found out that overusing bug bombs can explode a house. I also discovered that you can't make a usable candle out of earwax and a refrigerator door can't stop 9mm bullets. And it really isn't easy to take candy from a baby." - Bonnie Burton, CNet.com
"Too often, science is presented as a body of established facts to be handed down to obedient students. But "MythBusters" isn’t about facts, it’s about process: For every myth, the team has to figure out how to test the claim, then construct an experiment, carry out the tests and analyze the results.... Every episode is an object lesson in the scientific method. Scientists had often been depicted in entertainment, but rarely had audiences seen people actually doing science. Obviously, experiments staged for television can’t have the rigor of peer-reviewed lab work. But "MythBusters" captures the underlying mind-set of science. At a time when "skepticism" too often means rejecting any ideas one finds politically unpalatable, "MythBusters" provides a compelling example of real scientific skepticism, the notion that nothing can be held true until it is confirmed by experimentation." - James B. Meigs, NY Times
"The great gift of the series has been to remind us that the world isn't always what we want or believe it to be, that your beliefs can be tested and might be proved wrong -- which is not at all the same thing as "losing." Indeed, if you prize fact over faith, you can only win." - Robert Lloyd, LA Times