Editor’s Note: This review was written immediately after the premiere (and only) episode of Taskmaster aired on The CW Network. Due to power issues in the Northeast due to Tropical Storm Isaias this review was delayed and supposed to run today — without knowledge of the announcement of the show’s cancellation.
Completely dumb, utterly ridiculous, and throughly enjoyable is the best way to sum up Taskmaster, a show that takes five British comedians and puts them through Beat the Clock-style challenges. It’s a less degrading version of the Jimmy Carr hosted mid-2000s show Distraction, which may be why American fans are quick to compare Taskmaster to Double Dare.
Host Greg Davis and co-host Alex Horne (the show’s creator), ask the five contestants to do silly tasks. The CW Network aired its first episode (taken from Series 8 of the British series) of Taskmaster last week with comedians/contestants: Ian Stirling, Joe Thomas, Lou Sanders, Paul Sinha and Sian Gibson. These five were to bring a strong smell, find a hidden baby monitor, put on a ventriloquist show, and more.
After the pre-recorded stunts, the five comedians participate in an in-studio stunt, such as trying to fill a bucket strapped around their waist with the most grams of donuts. Whoever ends the episode with the most points wins. If there is a tie, an extra stunt is shown and a winner is declared. Once there is a definitive winner, all five comedians come back every week until the end of the series (American season) where a definitive champion takes home a Greg Davis trophy.
Over the course of an hour with commercials, everyone on stage snarks at each other about their skills and curses, giving the show the feel of a cocktail party with seven friends from college. While fun, the cursing, of which there is a considerable amount, is censored. It gets annoying because Britain and the United States have different language censorship standards, so the bleeps quickly add up and detract from the show a bit. However, unless you are concerned about the dignity of five people willingly doing absurd activities on camera, you will laugh out loud several times.
Unless you’re an Anglophile who loves Greg Davies or one of the featured comedians and have been waiting for Taskmaster to come to the United States, this show isn’t a must-see. However, it’s something you can get sucked into when there is nothing better to watch. In quarantine America, we all need a stupid show to turn off our brain and relax. If BBC America showed a weekend marathon, you would watch every episode aired and have no regrets. For a show that doesn’t have highbrow ambitions, there’s no greater compliment.
