The Fourth of July is always there to remind us that we aren't the country we fancy ourselves being, but this year's national try-not-to-blow-your-hand-off munitions festival was even grimmer given that the current season of Taskmaster's final episode aired on Friday as well. As we all know from our reading, Taskmaster is the absolute zenith of humanity's artistic development, and creator and co-host Alex Horne is proof that the key to television greatness is simply giving a smart and funny person full license to be funny and smart, which includes trusting them to find other people with similar skills. True, I promised I would never rave about this show again, but there has never been a better time for prevaricating frauds with minimal cultural scope, so here we are.
That said, Taskmaster is what comes of not being fixated on someone "winning" a thing but rather the process that makes the winning worth the walk. Most British game/panel shows use points only as props, where the American versions slap a dollar sign in front of whatever number they find and encourage contestants to take part in a war of all against all, overseen by some host who fails to make up for in name recognition what he lacks in charm. Taskmaster is exactly the kind of show our own "creatives" could not produce at gunpoint because they would be too busy trying to turn it into a vehicle for Stephen A. Smith.
Not that they haven't tried, in their own lazy way. Between the horrifying American Taskmaster that lasted only eight episodes and the two series (8 and 9) of the original that aired on the CW network and was promptly canceled because it allegedly got poorer ratings than Fridge Wars, Taskmaster has served as an ongoing reminder that we used to routinely make excellent entertainment and now hang our oversized hats on towering vapidities like Bachelor In Paradise. And this doesn't even get into historically great British shows like Absolutely Fabulous and Red Dwarf which were adapted into American versions and died, deservedly, like roaches. We either buy stuff, then dump it by the roadside when we don’t know what to do with it, or we borrow stuff, Americanize it, and then euthanize it midway through the credits in episode three.
But because each Taskmaster series is actually made with care in casting, wit, and trust in the cast to deliver the wit, they last only 10 episodes and then go into stasis for four or five months while the next series is created and performed, so the last episode of each series tends to be a delightfully depressing exercise. Oh, you can binge all 181 episodes, plus the eight Junior Taskmaster episodes plus the 209 podcasts, plus the outtake clips, but then people will start sending social workers around to see why you haven't picked up your mail in three weeks. The rest of us must amuse ourselves with moments like the prize task "bring in the thing you've borrowed from a close friend" in Episode 8 of the last series, in which Fatiha El-Ghorri offered up an elegant Islamic prayer mat and a touching story to go with it as a potential "prize" moments before Rosie Ramsey produced a pelvic floor exerciser she borrowed from her sister for the same bit and a story that will cause your face to be thrust into your own hands almost reflexively. The phrase "juxtapositionally preposterous" does not begin to cover it.
If you have somehow read this far despite not being familiar with the Taskmaster ethos, YouTube is thick with episodes that explain the premise far more comprehensively inside a single 45-minute investment, and besides, it's been on for more than a decade now. It would be like explaining The Simpsons: If you don't know it by now, you're not interested in knowing it, and may the gods retrieve your soul from the eternity dumpster at their leisure. But if you are intrigued, you will be rewarded 181-fold. If nothing else, Simon Cowell and Howie Mandel are nowhere to be found, a blessing by any measure.
Horne, to his additional credit, must understand this sense of series-concluding despair by now, because the same day as the final episode of Season 19 aired on Channel 4 and a day before it was released internationally on YouTube, he saw to it that the cast for the next series was announced, thus saving us from a more miserable summer than the one with which we are already engaged. Anticipation can overcome anything Panthers-Jaguars has to offer.
This matters because in these ridiculous times, we need some things we can absolutely rely upon come hell, high water, or CNN bulletins datelined "Washington." Horne has somehow selected 125 different people over the 20 series and various one-offs including stage shows (and this does not include the 24 overcaffeinated children in the six-episode Junior Taskmaster) without derailing any series, so if you happen to find one contestant to be off-putting (you humorless simpleton), there are always four more at any given moment to keep the hook properly baited. Even on the show itself, players who seem like odd fits at first glance like human jump ball Richard Osman and wonderfully encrusted Jo Brand get into the spirit quickly, thus making a seemingly weird choice a good one. In that way, we have a show with more than 120 people that almost casts itself.
And because each cast seems incongruous in the initial reveal but by Episode 3 become a seamless unit of rule-mauling pie-fighting, this next one seems an odd fit until you realize that to distrust the process is to deny the process. There is one performer with a birthdate from each of the last five decades, from 27-year-old Ania Magliano (award-winning comedian who at one point wrote for apocalypse peddler Frankie Boyle) to 61-year-old Sanjeev Bhaskar (who has an Order of the British Empire he can yank from his wallet at any time), and if neither they nor Maisie Adam (31), Phil Ellis (42-ish, announced himself to be the least-known person ever to appear on the show) and Reece Shearsmith (55) are familiar names to you, the show takes care of that. We are loath to say, "Trust us, it will come to you" in any context, but it always has so far, even if you are not stuck into British performers. To date, Jason Mantzoukas of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks & Recreation fame is the only American whose work is mostly done in the States to ever make the cut (Desiree Burch from Series 12 is also American, but works almost entirely in Britain), largely because he buffaloed his way on like any stereotypical American would and spent the series handling any shambolic messes that needed creating or sets that needed destroying, again like any stereotypical American. He was, as are they all, an initially baffling yet inspired choice.
The only thing we do not know is how long we have to wait for Series 20, because while they have traditionally been sprung upon our corneas in March and September, Series 19 didn't break until May. If this means we have to wait until November with all the rampant soul-draining dystopias headed our way in our daily lives, it might be time to start rooting for the comet to adjust its aim. Then again, in a world in which nothing is worth waiting for because it always has the power to disappoint, this never does, and if September and October seem to grind to a halt (the NFL will do that to you), well, you cannot rush moments like Mike Wozniak needing nearly two hours to deliberately express a fart, Victoria Coren Mitchell in a bike race even though she has never ridden a bike, or Sue Perkins plowing blindfolded through a pyramid of empty cans and telling Horne, "What an absolute shower of shit you are." When you take everything into account, no sentence has ever carried more of the world's weight.
