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Xelkelvos posted:I feel like the UK one has those complex ones because enough people in a given round just laterally solving the task can get boring and its been around long enough that lots of participants are wise to it It comes down to who is in the series really, but I guess they won't really have a sense for how the contestants are going to solve tasks until the show has already started and it's too late to change anything. The best is when you have a mix of lateral thinkers, ones that take the most straightforward approach, and ones that just immediately panic. One of my favorite tasks in the whole show was the "what's in the briefcase" task from Champion of Champions, where they had a bunch of different options and every single person took a completely different approach. That sort of thing is probably very hard to plan, though, and CoC has the advantage of them already having a good idea of what everyone's approach to tasks is going to be from their original appearances on the show.
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Sep 3, 2021 00:18
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I know they do them in batches - I haven't listened to most of the podcast episodes but in one I have listened to, Mel Giedroyc mentioned doing all of her tasks in a single 4 day stretch, because she just happened to have that chunk of time free in her schedule. I think for most of them they will do multiple tasks per day but the days are spread out. The team tasks I do believe they do entirely in one day, just because finding one day where all the team members are going to be available is likely hard enough, doing multiple days would be even worse.
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Sep 3, 2021 02:23
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Dell_Zincht posted:Getting Frank Skinner was what basically persuaded the other Series 1 contestants to sign up. Yeah as I understand it, a lot of people were hesitant about the show, feeling like it might end up just being some lovely reality show "lets make celebrities eat a bunch of gross stuff" type of thing, but when Frank Skinner agreed to do it they figured "well if he's willing to do it maybe there's something to this after all".
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Sep 16, 2021 18:41
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99 CENTS AMIGO posted:I was talking it over the other day and out of the UK seasons I’ve seen (all of them except 9, which isn’t on YouTube anymore), the only one that I enjoyed a little less was 6. The contestants didn’t really gel with each other, which I think would have been fine otherwise, but Liza Tarbuck sitting in the middle and rarely looking like she wanted to be there really sucked the energy out. Hell, I even liked Russell Howard for the first time! 9 is on YouTube, they just don't have a playlist for it for some reason. Here's episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BNpnbiFlTk (It's possible this might be a region thing - I can see it in Canada but it may be blocked in the UK?) *edit* apparently they do have a playlist for it, although again, if you can't see it, it might be a regional thing. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Sep 23, 2021 |
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Sep 23, 2021 00:43
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happyhippy posted:Had my reservations with Alan Davies and Victoria being on it. I feel like Alan may end up being a pretty strong contestant; he's a lot smarter than his comedic persona, but I think he's also the type to not over think a task and just take the straightforward path in those cases when the straightforward path is actually the best option (like he did with the balloon). Victoria I think will be fun because the show has such a great way of really breaking down contestants that have a very dignified public persona and getting them to laugh at themselves.
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Sep 24, 2021 18:03
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Honestly if that was her first ever time on a bike she did extremely well. She mostly just lacked the confidence to take her hands off the handlebar and trust that the bike would maintain its direction. She was pretty good at keeping balance by making sure the bike kept moving (although the fact that you had to keep the bike moving as one of the rules of the task probably helped there). I feel like my approach to the bike task would have been to try to do it quickly with fewer mistakes, under the assumption that people trying to keep the bike moving slowly would lose their balance a lot and end up racking up tons of penalties that rendered the actual time to complete the course basically irrelevant (which is what did end up happening to everyone). It's probably an "easier said than done" thing though and I could easily imagine myself believing this was a very smart approach and then screwing up at each station trying to grab stuff while keeping the bike going at a decent enough speed to maintain balance, and then getting penalized for having to double back.
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Oct 15, 2021 09:38
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Tenebrais posted:Yeah Victoria did a great job on the bike considering that she learned how to ride one in five minutes before the task started. Yeah he mentions offhand in the studio segment that they didn't think you could crack it with only half the code, but if you're experienced with that kind of simple substitution cipher you can crack it with none of the code so long as you have a decent amount of sample text. It would probably be a fair assumption on the show though that it would be quicker to find the clues they have almost certainly hidden rather than try to crack it completely blind (especially since she already had the half puzzle in front of her so she could see that there were answers there).
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Oct 15, 2021 19:36
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GazChap posted:Yeah, I think the task said that the bike needed to be moving forwards at all times, but didn't say you had to be moving forwards towards the finish line. I'd have just spent ages riding around in laps to build up some time to halve. I feel like despite the task saying that timing would start 5 minutes from reading the task, Alex didn't actually start the timer until they crossed the starting line, just based on his comment to Victoria when she stumbled before even starting the course that they hadn't started yet (although he might have just been nice to her because he knew this was already going to be a bit more difficult for her than intended).
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Oct 16, 2021 22:16
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drunken officeparty posted:I bet they didn’t think they would be as slow as they were, but if she had something like 1 point per Submarine it would have been great. Yeah seems like they thought that extra task would be harder than it was because she got it in like the first minute. Having to get them to say submarine as many times as possible, without them ever catching on that she was trying to get them to say it would have been pretty great. That said Alex completely losing his poo poo during this task was great. He usually tries to keep his composure or hide that he's laughing behind his tablet, but after an hour I imagine his ability to keep a straight face was pretty diminished.
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Oct 17, 2021 00:42
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Something I'm surprised nobody tried in the live task was ripping their sheets in half to make twice as many planes - you were penalized for how many sheets you took, not how many planes you threw. Although given how horrible everyone's accuracy was it probably wouldn't have helped in the end.
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Oct 29, 2021 08:29
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Anals of History posted:It needs to be in whatever hall of fame or best of collection for Taskmaster. I was gasping even as a non-soccer fan. The progression of the gifts was honestly perfect. You start off with Alan having a pretty standard gag gift, the kind of thing you see in most prize tasks. Then you have three genuine attempts to get something the person would actually like, to Greg's increasing annoyance, and finally capping it all off with the most perfectly calibrated insult to Alan imaginable.
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Oct 30, 2021 00:02
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LesterGroans posted:That season isn't close to my favourite, but it had some great moments. Joe and Sian were a hilarious team, the train yard hide and seek was fantastic (Sian: "Can we keep playing?"), and I absolutely love how mortified Ian was in the studio when he saw how he was treating Lou during their team task. "Welcome to your new life" is another great moment from that season
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Nov 5, 2021 20:30
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DurosKlav posted:I'm sure I'm the only one, but I really think its time to kill the team task or shake them up somehow by moving the teams around which I know could be difficult due to scheduling and all. Theres always been something about them that I've never liked, even going back to the first season. They feel clunky with uneven teams, which makes it harder to make a task where the extra person isnt giving the team such a massive advantage. Or you just get something lame like Guz sitting off to the side eating chocolate buttons while Desiree and Morgana do the real task, or Morgana just saying a code word or whatever and being done while Desiree and Guz do the code breaking. I think it was in S2? Where they brought in Josh Widdicombe to serve as the third to even up the teams during one of the tasks, and I'm not sure why they don't do that more often. I mean it doesn't have to be Josh every time, I imagine he is probably busy, but it would be a good way to bring back popular former contestants for brief appearances while also preventing those awkward "we only really wrote this task for a team of 2" third wheel situations. Although on the other hand, sometimes the pairings of two people end up making for a very charming team in a way that a team of three can't really do.
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Nov 26, 2021 04:17
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I'm wondering now if they included it solely because it turned Desiree's line about not having a gag reflex in the proposal task into a funny callback
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Nov 26, 2021 22:52
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Khablam posted:VCM's gradual decline into "what is any of this seriously" was great. What made it art was when she thought she understood a task, but oh so didn't. Victoria's reaction to the phone call task was pretty great as well. You can tell why she and David Mitchell got married.
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Nov 28, 2021 05:37
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Pablo Bluth posted:I think he has a point. It's not that everyone needs to attack the show with the seriousness of Ronaldo trying to win kickball. But the show only works if everyone treats the format with a minimum level of respect and earnestness. Yeah, I think he has the right idea here. The competition isn't actually serious, but the competitive spirit still needs to be there for the show to work.
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Nov 29, 2021 23:14
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I think the producers generally nix anything that would be actually dangerous, or at the very least, make them wear safety gear. There's been a few times in the studio where one of them said something along the lines of "I wanted to do X but they wouldn't let me".
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Dec 24, 2021 22:25
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kazmeyer posted:Yeah, there's something special about Taskmaster. Watching comedians apply their wit (or lack thereof sometimes) to a "thinking-outside-the-box" kind of puzzle just results in gold more often than not. And Greg Davies does imperious and capricious in equal measure SO well. Alex was a goddamn genius putting that show together. I think a big advantage TM has over panel shows is the extended format as well, where you get to build a sense of familiarity with the cast over the season instead of everything being a one-off. It has a way of stripping away the TV personas people have cultivated for themselves due to the fact that it's hard to maintain the façade for that long, on top of the constant embarrassment from seeing how they've performed the tasks.
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Jan 7, 2022 14:35
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I feel like season 6 is still good TV, it's just a bit of a lull between seasons 5 and 7 which were both much better, so a lot of people rate it harshly in comparison.
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Jan 24, 2022 04:14
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Alhazred posted:Series 10: Johnny Vegas is far too emotionally invested in these tasks. He's having way too many nervous breakdowns. I like how Mawaan is constantly trying to find loopholes and bend the rules without breaking them. Mawaan is great because he switches wildly between genuinely brilliant lateral thinking and just like, straight up forgetting the rules he just read. I think he has a wider range of intelligence on display than any other contestant that's been on the show.
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Feb 17, 2022 19:10
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I think what was fun about Katherine is that despite doing absolutely terribly at basically every task, she never seemed to be particularly flustered by it. Like it never once occurred to her in the moment that things could have gone any differently.
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Feb 18, 2022 02:37
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Honestly I don't know if Taskmaster ever could have done well with a US series. There just isn't a great pool of candidates for it since there's not a lot of comedians in the US who are A) famous enough to be recognizable to a significant American audience, B) not so famous that they would see doing the show as beneath them, and C) good at improv. The UK has a huge stable of comedians that fit that mold because of all the panel shows but American comedy is a basically either standup, sitcoms, or huge Hollywood releases. I mean the closest thing you have is Whose Line is it Anyway, which got its start in the US by just bringing over the Americans (and Canadian) that were already on the British version, and has largely kept the same lineup ever since, with even the one rotating spot being a fairly small set of regulars and the occasional big celebrity.
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Mar 5, 2022 01:05
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think the biggest problem for doing an American series is that I don't think the format would be easy to communicate to the people involved. America doesn't have the tradition of panel shows for comedians to do the rounds on, and I don't think American comedy is anywhere near as closely-knit. People might misinterpret it as a reality show. Yeah the tight-knit element I think is a huge deal. A lot of the people in UK comedy either know each other professionally, or have at least done that kind of work often enough that they can fake that sort of rapport with someone they're meeting for the first time on a show. Although "people might misinterpret it as a reality show" was actually an issue for the UK Taskmaster as well and finding people for the first series was a bit of a struggle because people were worried it was just going to be some BS where they'd just have to eat a bunch of gross stuff on camera. Frank Skinner getting involved is apparently what convinced everyone else to give it a go since he's a fairly well respected comedian and they figured if he was willing to do it, it's probably not going to be that bad.
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Mar 5, 2022 05:04
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LesterGroans posted:I just remembered a TMNZ task that I want the UK version to steal. Have one of the members of the three-person team try to sabotage a task without it being obvious. I thought that was a great twist and there's still a lot that can be done with it. They had a task sort of like that in the UK version, although I forget which series it was. It was the one where they had each member of the team have conflicting objectives and they weren't explicitly told that they had to compete with each other (in fact they were absolutely being scored as a team and the smart move was to just tell each other what they were meant to do and find a way to cooperate) but one team 100% interpreted it this way and kept sabotaging each other and and no point did it occur to any of them to simply explain why they were doing what they were doing.
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Mar 10, 2022 23:39
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Kingtheninja posted:I wonder if they'll just put champions 2 off another year and do two of them back to back. I think they've already filmed Champions 2 right? I thought I remember someone saying Ed Gamble had mentioned doing it already on the podcast. Not sure what they're waiting for with it.
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Mar 30, 2022 21:55
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I feel like they've probably made a deliberate decision to try to avoid being too "fanservicey" by bringing back old favorites, and honestly they're probably right. It keeps the show fresh for longer when it's always new faces involved. I mean the whole arc of every Taskmaster series is going from "I don't know who any of these people are" to "I would die for literally any of them".
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Mar 31, 2022 23:01
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Khanstant posted:gently caress him, but the sentiment remains for the good improv comedians who aren't pests, that comedic sensibility and quick thinking and banterability seem to be the closest natural way to evoke the UK Gameshow spirit that just never evolved in the US, and which seems integral to the formula's success. Probably doesn't help that american media spread out across east coast, west coast, south coast, Canada. Seems like you need some kind of field-narrowing to get some sense of natural bullshitting around among contestants. I feel like in the US you do have some pretty localized entertainment scenes, with New York and LA being the huge hotspots, but what seems to always happen is you'll get these comedy groups that emerge from The Second City or wherever and might go on to do a successful sketch series on HBO, or they join SNL, or even just get big on YouTube, but then after that they seem to all just kind of go their separate ways and none of it has really coalesced into a larger comedy circuit the way that panel shows have in the UK.
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Apr 18, 2022 00:55
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enki42 posted:College Humor would probably absolutely nail it but WAAAAAYYY too niche for a property that's been on mainstream TV everywhere else. Maybe in 2016 when they were doing their TV experiments that would have made sense. This is a tricky thing about American comedy really, there are a lot of people who are like, known, but not known enough to be on TV. Taskmaster UK does include a few lesser known comedians now but it's telling that the early series were almost all panel show regulars, they knew they weren't going to get anywhere with a cast full of people the audience had never heard of. In American comedy you kind of have the problem of people are either "YouTube famous" or "Movie famous", where the former is too small to draw in a wide audience to a brand new TV show, while the latter is just too big to do the show in general (the same reason why the UK show is never going to have like, Simon Pegg on it). Honestly I feel like YouTube probably would actually be the natural home for an American version of Taskmaster, but yeah it's probably a thing where even the bigger channels would not be able to get the official license so they'd just have to do their own ripoff version.
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Apr 19, 2022 01:51
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I can't believe that this show must have made Joe Wilkinson buy a second suit
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Apr 23, 2022 02:39
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My Lovely Horse posted:I'm pretty sure they've done B) on at least one other occasion where they had a red herring setup task and a "real" one based on it, although details elude me. There was "make the most exotic sandwich" followed by "eat your exotic sandwich". Although the fact that nobody actually managed to complete the second part meant that they were mostly being scored on the first one.
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Apr 23, 2022 23:40
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nerox posted:This season's studio banter has been awesome. Alex has broken character a lot he is getting so cracked up. I absolutely loved how everyone lost it at Ardal's extremely dumb "It doesn't remember me" joke. He just delivered it so sincerely that it caught them all off guard.
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May 6, 2022 20:17
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SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like it might be one of those English things where she's rude in a way that is surprising and different over there but pretty mundane over here. Honestly it does seem like "don't worry about it too much" is kind of a winning strategy on Taskmaster. It doesn't always work out for the people who go in with a 100% "don't give a poo poo" attitude, but they tend to land pretty frequently in the middle of the pack, while the people who really panic and go nuts do the worst.
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May 12, 2022 03:52
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oh jay posted:Having 1 or 2 contestants forget or ignore part of the task is a feature not a bug. I feel like the best version of that task was in Series 5, with the three simultaneous tasks and the three items to complete them. The problem with the series 10 version is that it's pretty obvious that the setup is "something you do on an earlier task is going to make a later task much harder", but there's not really any way to be smart about it, you just kind of have to get lucky and hope the order you choose to complete things in is ideal. The three task version on the other hand, all the information was available up front and they absolutely could have read all three tasks, planned out the best item to use for each one, and done it pretty easily, but well, the time started as soon as they opened the first envelope.
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May 16, 2022 22:07
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Yeah I'm surprised how bad the shoe throwing was, although it might also be a thing where the distance is larger than it looks on camera because the angle really compresses the space. Like my instinct would be to heave a shoe rather than throw it (so it doesn't spin in the air), but it might not go far enough doing it that way.
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May 27, 2022 19:01
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Pablo Bluth posted:One of the downsides of the format is that it requires quite a bit of time commitment, plus a willingness to take part in a type of activity that isn't the standard comedian job. Thus I think there's a lot of bigger names people would absolutely love but who aren't likely to appear. David Mitchell is a name that often comes up in TM wishlists but more recently he's revealed he's given a hard no to ever appearing: I can't imagine that Victoria came home after doing it and went "it was great, you'd love it" to change his mind on the subject either. I think he does probably have the right idea about how he would be on the show though, his comedic persona just doesn't quite fit with the kind of stuff they do on the show. He's great at banter but he would probably be very noticeably miserable when doing tasks, and not in a way that would be fun to watch.
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May 29, 2022 02:35
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I feel like when they wrote that task they assumed people would give up faster than they did, hence the "oh god seriously do not watch this task it's the worst we've ever done" warnings when it turned out everyone was a lot more committed than they anticipated.
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Jun 3, 2022 21:12
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Piell posted:Yeah I also thought the bags were a lot smaller than they were (and based on crowd reaction so did they), I thought it was large purse sized rather than duffel bag I am curious if they were actually large enough to fit all the cans available or if Bridget's target was simply impossible. The bags did look pretty big and nobody was packing them in as efficiently as possible, but it does seem like the sort of thing they'd do to provide too many cans and encourage them to bite off more than they can chew.
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Jun 11, 2022 06:36
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I do think they sometimes stack the deck to try to give an episode win to a contestant who otherwise has done quite badly and is definitely not going to win the series, but there is only so far they can go with that since they can't really predict how the prize round or the studio task will go.
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Jun 11, 2022 22:40
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A bunch more outtakes just went up on the YouTube channel, including what I assume is the banter that was missing from one episode (I guess it just got cut for time, it's a pretty good banter section) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9UASo0iAQM
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Jun 17, 2022 18:38
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WhiteHowler posted:Now I'm just angry because all I want is a new American Taskmaster show, done right, with Craig Ferguson as the Taskmaster. It's been mentioned before in the thread but Conan O'Brian and Andy Richter would probably have been a good pair for American TM. Although I do agree Craig Ferguson as TM would also have been great, I'm just not sure who they'd then cast as the assistant (I mean they could still go with Andy Richter but the whole point of him and Conan is they already work together and have a dynamic that would fit the show very well). Really there were a lot of miscalculations made with the American Taskmaster series. It's easy to imagine a version of it that could have been good but there's just no panel show culture in American comedy so I think a lot of execs don't really know how to make the format work. It's probably why it's the only international series that Horne had to be personally involved with.
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Sep 14, 2022 03:35
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