5 reasons (and the 5 best seasons) to love the wickedly hilarious UK panel show Taskmaster

polygon.com:

It’s taken a few years of me recommending it nonstop, but it finally seems like Taskmaster is catching on in America (you’re welcome). Of course, I can’t take total credit for the concerted effort by the show (and its devoted fans) to make itself known stateside, but I’d like to think that my endless evangelism has had at least a little bit to do with it.

Taskmaster is a U.K. reality show whose genre lands somewhere between quiz show and panel show. Each season, a set of five comedians and performers are filmed doing a variety of deranged tasks, independently or as small teams, and then those tasks are broadcast before the contestants, a live audience, and the Taskmaster himself, comedian Greg Davies, who judges them and doles out points accordingly — plus his assistant, Alex Horne, who is really the mastermind behind the whole franchise as the show’s creator, designing all of the fiendish tasks and often assisting (or refusing to assist) the contestants in their efforts to complete them.

The revolving cast of contestants is one of the main attractions, of course, but the heart and soul of Taskmaster is the dynamic between Davies and Horne. Davies, a 6-foot-8 mountain of a man, always calls his 6-foot-2 assistant “Little Alex Horne,” and the surreal banter between the two of them never fails to get a reaction out of the lineup of contestants. The atmosphere the two well-practiced hosts create is the perfect petri dish for improvised hilarity on the part of the contestants — usually four comedians and one other wildcard performer like an actor or a television host, all carefully selected for maximum chaotic chemistry. After everyone watches the previously recorded tasks together, each episode culminates in a task