What The Hell America!

For ages, various friends of mine recommended that I check out Taskmaster, a British comedy game show in which a group of five comedians earn points by completing a series of silly challenges. The show, which first premiered in 2015, has crossed the ocean in recent years to become a word-of-mouth hit, with fans drawn to its comic hijinks and nonsensical premise. Yet every time my friends nudged me toward Taskmaster, I’d wrinkle my nose. Making the program sound exciting is tough: The idea of stand-up comics and character actors improvising art projects and undergoing physical trials doesn’t seem like it’d be very fun to watch. And more important, I spent much of my youth in England; as I’d repeat to anyone who’d listen, I left the country to escape series like this one.

Taskmaster is what’s known as a panel show, a format that is a pillar of British TV. It’s as foundational as the pre-dinnertime soap operas or the smoldering costume dramas that are exported to Masterpiece. Series in this genre are typically simple and cheap to produce: A committee composed of several comedic entertainers make fun of current events (Mock the Week, Have I Got News for You), answer trivia questions (QI, The Big Fat Quiz of the Year), or suss out which of them is telling the truth (the aptly titled Would I Lie to You?). The panelists’ goal is to amuse one another as much as they do the audience. This type of comedy series can be good background viewing, but it’s also overwhelmingly homogenous—both the rotating casts and the bits often start to feel repetitive. So the thought of diving into Taskmaster didn’t initially appeal to me, even with the more competitive angle; after all, plenty of panel shows ostensibly revolve around a game, even if winning it doesn’t matter.

The Taskmaster setup, I discovered, is special, despite the glancing similarities to programs of its ilk. After enough hounding by some pals—British and American ones—I gave in and fired up an episode. (In the United States, the series is available to watch in its entirety on YouTube and Pluto TV.) At first, I was at most mildly amused by the seemingly traditional panel-style proceedings. But I was properly hooked after the comics were issued a bizarre prompt: “Create the best caricature of the person on the other side of the curtain. You may not look at the person. The person may only say yes and no.”

Read: The game show that parodies your to-do list

Strange requests of this nature, I soon learned, are Taskmaster’s bread and butter. The activities are overseen by the titular Taskmaster, Greg Davies, and his assistant, Alex Horne. Horne is the show’s creator, but on-screen, he plays an eager second fiddle to Davies, who presides over each episode with imperious fury. Davies judges the panelists based on a combination of in-studio and on-location challenges. The ones undertaken onstage follow set rules: First, guests present the funniest answer to a ridiculous request (such as finding the “most interesting autograph on the most interesting vegetable”); then they take on a dare that unites them in some sort of tomfoolery.

The remote tasks, however, are the series’s centerpiece. Sometimes, the premise is straightforward—finding creative ways to fill a tub with water or slide the furthest distance, for example. Sometimes, it’s a more subjective concept, where who wins is totally up to Davies’s personal taste. And sometimes it’s a puzzle of sorts, a fiendish brainteaser designed by Horne and his team to get the best, most infuriated reactions from the participants. The contestants watch edited clips of their performances together, giving them the chance to see—and poke fun at—how they each accomplished the challenges.

The seemingly impossible assignment Horne and company have set for themselves is to create a weeks-long tournament focused on what appears to be a mundane idea. The stakes are somehow ridiculously low—the winner essentially just receives bragging rights, along with a comically ugly metal bust of Davies’s head—and incredibly high, for comedians looking to boost their notoriety. But the revelations that emerge, such as which comedian has a surprising level of artistic talent or a particularly creative approach to problem-solving, are more than just hilarious. The panelists handle their tasks seriously; each prompt yields very different results, and the methods they choose offer a small, fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of their brain. Watching how they go about keeping a basketball on a treadmill without touching it is as much part of the joy as hearing the jokes they tell about it afterward.

I started with Season 4, because it had several guests I recognized—the comedians Noel Fielding and Mel Giedroyc were well known when I lived in England, and the actor Hugh Dennis has memorably popped up in international hits such as Fleabag. Taskmaster almost always throws some up-and-coming British comics into the mix too; the variety makes for an exciting change of pace from the stagnant casts populating the panel shows I remember. The serialized format also helped me become a fan of the performers I was less familiar with. The emotional investment builds naturally, with the audience following the contestants week to week.

Read: The comic who’s his own worst enemy

The show even seems willing to expand its own comedic sensibilities. Season 19, which began airing last week, features a notable American player—the actor Jason Mantzoukas, a podcast and sitcom legend who’s probably best known for his work on The League and Parks and Recreation. Only one other American comedian, Desiree Burch, has been on Taskmaster before now; unlike Mantzoukas, she is established in the U.K. and has lived there for more than a decade. American humor can often be more brash than British comedy, which is cloaked in irony and self-deprecation. So far, however, Mantzoukas’s high energy is gelling well with the show’s competitive bent. The first episode—which, like every installment, landed on YouTube the day after its premiere—makes clear that his anarchic style would stand out against Taskmaster’s vibe of enthusiastic curiosity, what with its big, brassy score and fast-paced editing.

That spirit does take some getting used to. For its first few years, Taskmaster was a cult program even within the United Kingdom. It has since cultivated a loving fan base and expanded into a global franchise, with editions produced in New Zealand, Finland, and Croatia. By contrast, a spin-off made for U.S. audiences in 2018 flopped. Yet the producers seem to believe that the American audience is only growing, as bringing in Mantzoukas, putting every episode online, and announcing the Season 19 cast at an event in New York City all suggest. Instead of Americanizing it, however, it’s best to emphasize Taskmaster’s most easily translated quality: its sense of novelty. With reinvention baked right into the concept—new participants each season, new tasks each episode—it stays fresh and compelling far longer than the average British comedy game show.

I still swear I’ll never watch another panel series, as cute as the clips that come across my social-media feeds sometimes are. When it comes to Taskmaster, the efforts made to win over someone as resistant as me have worked: I’m now as fervent as the folks who urged me years ago to check it out.