Alex Horne Names The Real Reason Taskmaster US 'Wasn't As Good' As The UK Version

Greg Davies and Alex Horne’s hit TV show, Taskmaster, recently got the UK spinoff Junior Taskmaster ― a show which sees children, instead of fully-grown comedians, battle it out for the approval of comic Rose Matafeo.

The new series has surpassed expectations, with one Guardian critic writing: “They’ve messed with perfection... and it’s a triumph.”

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the show’s short-lived US remake, which saw Alex sit alongside comedian and musician Reggie Watts. 

In a recent interview with Podcast Rex’s The Peer Project, Alex (who created the show’s award-winning format) said he feels “quite a lot of things” about the American spin-off’s shortcomings.

Though Alex says the LA studio was “fun”, he added that the American audience “whooped far too much”. 

And while he says they had “great contestants,” he admitted: “Looking back, I can see very clearly why it didn’t work... there were so many compromises.” 

“Reggie [Watts] would be a brilliant Taskmaster with a different assistant,” he continued, stating that he and the comedian didn’t have “an awful lot of chemistry”. 

Then, there were US run times to contend with.

“22 minutes is far too short,” he confessed on the podcast.  “You couldn’t really get stuck into it, so we had to change the format a little bit. So the prize task was different, only one person brought it in.”

The Taskmaster star continued: “It was very rushed, there’s an advert every six minutes.” 

He ended by saying that they’d change “some elements” if they did it again, but “in general, it wasn’t as good as the British version”.

Alex previously told Radio Times in 2018: “We sort of did everything the channel told us to do, so we halved the length of the show.” 

“We made a few compromises, which we regret,” he told the publication, teasing: “Greg [Davies] and I would jump at the chance at doing it in America again, but on our own terms.”