EXCLUSIVE: Taskmaster is going day-and-date in the U.S. for the first time ever.
The twentieth season of the British comedy competition series, which plays on Channel 4 in its native UK, will run on YouTube when it launches on Thursday, September 11.
In the UK, it premieres at 9pm on Channel 4, and then drops an hour later on YouTube, at 10pm BST / 2pm PT / 5pm ET. This is the first time it will play simultaneously in the U.S. and UK.
You can see a first-look image for Season 20 above, featuring hosts Greg Davies and Alex Horne and new contestants Maisie Adam, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Phil Ellis, Ania Magliano and Reece Shearsmith.
Taskmaster has built a big online following and we can report today that its YouTube channel has now surpassed 1.2 billion views. The BAFTA- and Rose d’Or-winning show has almost two million subscribers worldwide, which places it among the most-followed British comedies on YouTube.
A considerable percentage of its viewers come from North America, where there has been local version since a short-lived Comedy Central series in 2018. Horne and Davies have appeared on several U.S. talk shows, including a widely watched and streamed interview on Late Night with Seth Myers, since the YouTube channel’s launch in 2019.
Season 19 competitor Jason Mantzoukas (The League, Brooklyn Nine-Nine) recently appeared on Seth Myers’ show to talk about the season, which has garnered 19 million North American views so far and helped subscriptions in the continent rise 200,000 this year.
Elsewhere, Horne and Davies have also hosted in-person screenings of the series in New York, which both times sold out completely within an hour of going on sale.
Despite its popularity, the UK show has not aired on an American network since being pulled from The CW’s schedule in 2020. A global streaming service, Taskmaster SuperMax+, launched in 2022, as Deadline reported first at the time. In November last year, Horne told the Peer Project podcast that, “With a bit of luck we’re going to try again” in the U.S., ideally with himself and Davies as the hosts.
The program, hosted by the all-powerful ‘Taskmaster’ Davies and his ‘assistant,’ “Little” Alex Horne, sees contestants – who usually hail from the comedy and acting worlds – set zany and creative tasks that are then ranked. Each episode has an individual winner, as the contestants amass points over the season to crown a champion.
Previous season winners include Josh Widdicombe, Katherine Ryan, Rob Beckett, Noel Fielding, Bob Mortimer, Kerry Godliman, Lou Sanders, Ed Gamble, Morgana Robinson, Dara O’Briain, Mae Martin, Sam Campbell, Andy Zaltzman and Matthew Baynton.
Created by Horne, who plays the downtrodden assistant character on the show, Taskmaster has run on British TV for over 10 years. It was originally on UKTV network Dave (now U&Dave), but switched to Channel 4 in late 2019. Avalon Television is the producer and international distributor. Local versions have been made in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Portugal, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Croatia. Reggie Watts hosted the U.S. version, which was cancelled after one season.
In Sweden, SVT’s version from Avalon and Baluba took primetime weekend shares of up 65%, and has now switched to TV4 for its eleventh and twelfth seasons. Discovery’s Norwegian version is on its twelfth season, winning the Norwegian TV Academy Award for Best Comedy Show last year. Finland’s version, which runs on MTV3, won Game Show of the Year at the Venla Gaala Awards, while Denmark’s TV2 series taking home the same award at the 2022 Vindere Awards.
