Taskmaster Series 17 ((free)) Guide

The secret sauce of any Taskmaster series is the chemistry. Series 17 assembled a lineup that felt less like five friends and more like five passengers trapped on a malfunctioning escape pod:

Alex, meanwhile, leaned harder into his role as the long-suffering martyr. In one task, Nick Mohammed taped Alex to a ceiling fan and spun him for three minutes "for the aesthetic." Alex took it with the stoic resignation of a man who has been hit by a frying pan, covered in cement, and buried alive in previous series. taskmaster series 17

In execution, however, it became a surprisingly tight-knit ensemble. There is often a "villain" or a disruptive force in Taskmaster (think of the chaos of James Acaster or the aggressive competence of Richard Herring), but Series 17 was defined by a shared language of neuroses. It was the "Anxiety Olympics," a collective therapy session where every contestant was teetering on the brink of a breakdown, and it was glorious. The secret sauce of any Taskmaster series is the chemistry

The live studio task in Episode 4 was an all-timer. Each contestant had to write a one-minute pop song about a specific vegetable (carrot, leek, parsnip, cabbage, and Brussels sprout). Nick Mohammed’s emotional ballad about a lonely carrot ("No Eyes to Cry With") scored surprisingly high, but Steve Pemberton’s dark cabaret number about a cannibalistic cabbage won the night. In execution, however, it became a surprisingly tight-knit

No series of Taskmaster is complete without a scoring controversy. In the penultimate episode, John Robins completed a complex navigation task in what was objectively the fastest time. However, due to a technicality (he used his phone as a light source, which Alex ruled was an "unauthorized tool"), he was disqualified.

For long-time fans, this series feels like a return to form after some experimental lineups in the mid-teens. It balances the "banter" (the studio chat) with the "actions" (the tasks) perfectly. There are no filler episodes; every 45-minute installment contains at least one moment that will make you pause the show because you are laughing too hard to hear the next line.

Series 17 was defined by tasks that played with the contestants’ perception of space and time. From the very first episode, it was clear that the production team had upped the ante on the "lure" tasks—those that seem simple but contain a hidden trap.