Stream It Or Skip It: 'Clarkson's Farm' Season 3 on Prime Video ...

As Clarkson’s Farm (Prime Video) returns for its third season, it’s 2022 in the English countryside of the Cotswolds, and all of the drought-stricken arable land at Jeremy Clarkson’s farm is unfortunately living up to the sarcastic name he gave it. Yep, Diddly Squat’s got troubles of the growing and spending variety, leaving Clarkson and resident Diddly Squatters Kaleb Cooper, Lisa Hogan, and “Cheerful Charlie” Ireland scrambling. “There must be other ways of making money besides the crops,” the host wonders in one of his usual voiceovers. “After a sit down with my special ‘thinking juice’” – anyone fancy a Hawkstone Lager? – “I started to form a plan…”

Opening Shot: This wouldn’t be a series built around a natural talker and haver of strong opinions like Clarkson if he didn’t interrupt the introductory shots of bucolic splendor, golden wheat, and scampering deer with some sour news. “Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.”

The Gist: The region’s driest summer in nearly 90 years has made the farmland resemble cracked concrete. Sad little potatoes, unripened sunflowers, and crops planted last season as guaranteed moneymakers literally dying on the vine. There are lots of “for fuck’s sake”’s and “bollocks” being uttered, but the trouble keeps mounting: Diddly Squat Restaurant can’t operate onsite as a farm-to-table establishment if there’s nothing edible coming from the farm to the table. And since it’s now too expensive to keep them, even the cows gotta go. Charlie Ireland secures their passports for travel, and they moo in sadness as the herd is separated.

The vibe of Clarkson’s Farm has always been part lark. It seemed to be sort of a whim for the motoring journalist and television presenter to take on the farm in the first place, and humor arose out of his improvisations as a landowner abutting against certain agricultural realities. But with even more of those unfortunate realities surfacing here in its third season, the series is exploring a balance. On one side are the very real challenges to existing systems of farming in England. And on the other are the kind of haphazard but novel and very watchable “solutions” to problems Jeremy Clarkson made famous on Top Gear. If his 500 acres of cultivated land isn’t in its thrive era, “I wonder if I can make money on the bit of the farm I’m not farming,” and the host turns to his land’s unruly, overgrown throngs of berries, apples, watercress, and the like. 

This also wouldn’t be a Clarkson production without a little bit of friendly competition. Because he’s wrapped up with trying to monetize blackberries – this involves a fiasco with an enormous piece of berry-harvesting machinery, as well as a low-tech, vacuumized DIY fix – Diddly Squat’s Kaleb Cooper is named manager of all the arable land. There will be a white board. It will tally each man’s costs and profits. And it will also be the centerpiece of some funny, argumentative bickering between Clarkson and Cooper, with Charlie Ireland trying to keep both of them focused on the farm’s quavering economic bottom line.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Clarkson recently gathered with his Top Gear mates for The Grand Tour: Sand Job, a typically enjoyable motorized romp which for this round takes the hosts through scenic northwest Africa. And the five families profiled in History Channel’s The American Farm encounter some of the same realities Clarkson and his people do at Diddly Squat – challenges of flux in both natural and economic systems.    

Our Take: “I wasn’t the only one being bashed on the rocks by Charlie’s waves of negativity. Because on the other side of the farm, Kaleb was also getting a drubbing…” The tone of Jeremy Clarkson’s voiceovers are familiar on Clarkson’s Farm – he might be talking about the latest round of adversity at Diddly Squat, but he could just as easily be talking about fixing up a vintage Aston Martin or lobbing his latest dig at fellow Top Gear host Richard Hammond. And yet, whether it’s because he’s mellowed with age or finds more concern with land he actually owns and lives on as opposed to automobiles purchased just to be messed with, Clarkson’s Farm finds its star in contemplation mode as much as it does his usual mode of destroy it and see what happens. He’s not just annoyed by the restrictive red tape applied to his operations by the local farm commission. Where his typical MO might be to ignore it, with the usual result being some kind of hilarity, here in season three the very real challenges faced by Diddly Squat give him true pause, and that creates an effective balance against the usual gripes and galavanting. We’re invested in how Clarkson’s going to solve his farm’s host of problems, and particularly enjoy it when the solution as he sees it meets real world whammies.

Sex and Skin: Well, Clarkson and his girlfriend Lisa Hogan, who also runs the farm’s gift shop, are both sad to see their full-grown cows sold. But keeping “the ones we made” – the herd’s calves – is at least a small consolation. 

Parting Shot: No spoilers! Let’s just say that the sense of satisfaction we derive from a ridealong with Jeremy Clarkson as he cruises the farm in his Lamborghini tractor is dampened when he receives an unexpected phone call. 

Sleeper Star: In season three, Charlie Ireland continues his reign as the sleeper star of Clarkson’s Farm. The professional farm management consultant’s measured exasperation at every next scheme undertaken at Diddly Squat makes him a brilliant comic foil to Jeremy Clarkson’s boorish bulldozer persona. Even better – for us viewers, anyway – with the advent of the “Unfarming” era, Ireland must now be the voice of reason for two farm managers in Clarkson and Kaleb Cooper. Charlie gets a lot of mileage out of the phrase “The risks have gone through the roof.”

Most Pilot-y Line: “I cannot believe pigs are complicated!” Like most of the endeavors Clarkson takes up spontaneously while operating Diddly Squat, his evolving plan to raise and sell pigs on the property is met with pushback from ol’ Cheerful Charlie.  

Our Call: STREAM IT. Clarkson’s Farm confronts some very real challenges in its third season. But just because the stakes are higher doesn’t mean Jeremy Clarkson won’t effort potentialsolutions that are very on-brand for the opinionated, always watchable television personality.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.