You may have noticed that I don't watch much in the category of game shows. Don't get me wrong. I've been a big fan of some of these programs in the past, particularly if they're food related. It's always handy to be able to pull out a few episodes of "The Great British Bake Off" during the holidays, which are safe viewing for everyone. However, when it comes to your traditional "Survivor" or "The Traitors" or "Masked Singer" style competition shows, I've lost all interest in following them regularly.
And then I heard about "Taskmaster," which is a British competition show that doesn't have anything that annoys me about traditional competition shows. Like the great "Whose Line is it Anyway?" the points don't really matter and the main objective is to make you laugh. To that end, everyone who appears on the program is a comedian or minor celebrity. Hosted by Greg Davies as the titular Taskmaster, with Alex Horne as his mild-mannered assistant, each series of the show has a cast of five contestants who return every week for the whole run, gradually building up rapport with each other as they accumulate points. I watched the most recent season, which featured Fatiha El-Ghorri, Jason Mantzoukas, Mathew Baynton, Rosie Ramsey, and Stevie Martin. Mantzoukas is one of the few Americans who has ever appeared on "Taskmaster," and seems to have decided that this requires him to be this season's agent of chaos.
As you might have guessed from the title, the competition revolves around accomplishing different tasks created by Davies and the team, most of them absurd. They range from fairly simple things like eating as much watermelon as you can in sixty seconds, or golfing with potatoes, to convoluted, multi-part challenges with too many rules. Some tasks require a lot of creativity, ingenuity, or just plain stubborn determination to complete. Others just need pure dumb luck. Many of the challenges are very physical, and are very funny to watch. I really like the format, where the "live" portion of the show involves two of the tasks and all of the judging happening in a studio in front of an audience. The more complicated and time-consuming tasks are all filmed beforehand at the Taskmaster House location, and edited clips are screened for everyone, allowing the judges and contestants to discuss them. These are some of the funniest parts of the show, where the contestants react to each other's efforts, try to explain their reasoning for certain outcomes, and just have a ball roasting each other.
One of the issues I've always had with reality competition shows is that the cameras and the editing can be very misleading, creating all this manufactured drama and wildly skewing the audience's perceptions of the contestants. On "Taskmaster," all of the contestants are entertainment professionals who have experience with being onscreen, and the show is completely transparent that their edits affect the narrative. In one of the episodes I watched, they first played one clip of a contestant seemingly accomplishing a task very quickly - only to reveal that it was a misdirection, and rolled a second clip showing all the mistakes and wrong turns that they had cut out of the first one. I like that the clips will group various attempts at tasks based on the contestants' tactics, often with the best or worst or wildest outlier used as the final punchline. Also, the judging is very arbitrary, coming down to Greg Davies mostly sticking to a preset rubric, but often just indulging his own whims or rewarding whoever has a good argument.
A lot of the show also comes down to the chemistry of a particular group of contestants. I specifically sought out series 19 of "Taskmaster" because I was already invested in Jason Mantzoukas's quest to be on the program, and I started hearing very good things about how the series was going about halfway through. I ended up bingeing six episodes in a single sitting. I don't think I've laughed so hard or so consistently at any television program in years. "Taskmaster" is really good at putting funny people in funny situations and enabling their ability to be funny. More importantly, this is the kind of humor that works for me - a mix of banter, absurdity, slapstick, and fairly malice-free one-upsmanship. The contestants are weird, profane, and violent, but supportive of each other. The hosts are officious, but lovably kooky weirdos too.
I don't know if I'll watch more of "Taskmaster" after I finish this series, but it's kind of nice just to know that it's there if I need it.
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