EPISODE 826: THE BRITISH NON-INVASION
(Also: Rosalind's a nightmare)
Hi! Welcome to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the newsletter in which we dare to ask the question, What are you watching? If you’re new around here, glad to have you! If you like what you read, there’s Venmo and Paypal at the end where you can leave me a tip!
Lots going on in the world! Let’s get into it.
THE WOWND UP
Iowa is using ChatGPT to ban books in its schools, West Virginia is cutting the humanities from its flagship university as a “cost cutting” move (because you know what’s better than book banning? Banning the classes that would require the books); and in addition to having its first major tropical storm in 100 years, Southern California had an earthquake today. “But please, tell me about how the weather’s been rough where you live,” said Californians today to their relatives everywhere.
Meanwhile in China a zoo has spent the last month insisting that its Malayan sun bear (above) is actually real and not a person in costume.
It probably didn’t help that the zoo has been posting WeChats from the bear, who identifies herself as “Angela”, including this one from a few weeks ago: "I got a call after work yesterday from the director of the zoo asking me if I was being lazy and found a human to take my place. ... That was totally uncalled for. I take the business of interacting with my visitors quite seriously."
Angie, if you’re really a bear, the only thing you take seriously is dinner.
Meanwhile Only Murders in the Building is back, this year with Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd guest starring, and they are absolutely killing it. Bravo to the writers for allowing Martin Short’s Oliver Putnam, whose Broadway backstory is usually filled with absurd disasters, to actually be a fantastic director.
Also for hiring Sara Bareilles to write this gorgeous lullaby for Streep and Ashley Park.
The NY Times had a great story on the music in this season, in which Streep talks about having “sort of a mental breakdown” the day she had to sing this and the burden of people’s expectations. It’s pretty great.
TONIGHT ON OUR PANEL
I don’t know if this interests anyone other than me, but have you ever noticed that the United Kingdom has a ton of great celebrity game shows? It’s something I stumbled into when I first started visiting Australia, where a considerable amount of programming was coming from the UK and the US. When it came to the UK it seemed like everything being imported was either a gritty cop/murder show or a celebrity game show.
And like, unexpected game shows, programs with concepts like who can take pictures from the week’s newspapers and make up the funniest captions, or guess things that begin with the letter “S.” (You think I’m kidding, but the British show QI, in which guests are asked to guess answers to things related to a given letter of the alphabet—for an entire season—has been on for 20 years, and is beloved.)
Shows like these, which are often called “panel shows,” have been around forever in both our countries. But in the UK it seems like they’ve just always been much more of a TV staple. Have I Got News For You, in which comedians and politicians ridicule the week’s news and which is often cited as the origin of the modern boom of panel shows, has been going since 1990 and over the course its history has often been the most popular show of the night, with an audience share as high as 20% of the UK.
Or there’s Would I Lie To You?, in which the panelists tell stories that are either lies or the truth and everyone else has to guess. I’ve spoken many times about this clip, which I think is one of the greatest moments in television history.
I really want to interview Bob Mortimer. Everything he does is silly and wonderful.
Many of these panel shows eventually get imported to the US. But they always fail, which fascinates me, because the British versions are compulsively watchable.
Case in point: Taskmaster, a game show in which 5 comedians agree to do 8-10 episodes worth of insane tasks, which are then judged and ridiculed by host Greg Davies and his assistant (and show creator) Alex Horne.
Most of the episodes can be found on YouTube. Here’s just one such task to give you a sense of just how weird and crazy this show is.
The hook of the show is the comedians coming at the tasks in unexpected ways, which often means considering what the task might allow for that isn’t immediately obvious. Like the task where the contestants were asked to propel a pea as far as they can on a red carpet, and one person takes the red carpet and the pea, hails a taxi and drives it all to a completely different town.
The show has been going for 15 seasons now, and it just never stops being fun to watch, I think because pretty quickly you’re invested both in the cast and in trying to figure out for yourself what might be the trick of each particular task, how you would play it. Maybe that’s what makes a lot of these kinds of shows fun—you’re both invited to anticipate how the guests are going to react, and you’re playing along in your own imagination as well.
As far as I can figure, there’s nothing about the Taskmaster concept that couldn’t work in the US. And yet…
It’s like someone had a tube of toothpaste filled with joy but squeezed it all out and then started filming. It lasted one season, and to me that seems that is a miracle.
I’ve read different arguments online about why these kinds of shows don’t transfer well. Most of them seem to come down to Brits have a different sense of humor, which is certainly true.
But I think there’s also something in there about the way these shows are put together, a sense of play and mutual delight that you might hear on a comedy podcast here, but you’re not going to find on TV much. I think our equivalent was really Conan. That’s where comedians here could go to be absolutely ridiculous.
Fallon occasionally tries to do smaller bits like this, too, but his stuff is so highly produced, it’s really the anti-British panel show. Every Fallon game feels like it’s testing the waters on a possible spinoff. What makes a British panel show great is everyone being so silly they destroy all chance of ever being spun off into anything. They’re like those Buddhist sand mandalas, here to be delightful for a moment and then gone forever (except on YouTube).
Silliness—it’s as ephemeral as a lightning bug, and yet somehow it makes reality seem like something to laugh about and relish.
I BET IT’S GOOD THOUGH
I’ve got two stories for you in my “to read” folder.
One is about the challenges that states face in redesigning their flags.
The other is an interview with the great cartoonist ND Stevenson about his new Netflix film Nimona, which is based on the wonderful webcomic he did about a kid in a fantasy knights-and-dragons land who can change their form into pretty much anything and goes to work for the leading villain, who is actually a pretty okay person.
Here’s one line from it that leapt out at me:
We are all, in our own ways, a question without an answer. I think a lot of us feel that way, and I want to tell stories about that.
And if anyone’s interested in what I’m doing elsewhere, I did a piece on the TV show Good Omens as an attempt to free religious people from some of the baggage that keeps us from being the people we want to be. (Good Omens, about an angel and a demon who work together to stop Heaven and Hell from destroying the universe, is such a good show.)
VIEWER MAIL
Regular readers of the Wow may remember that about 10 days ago I did a piece on the creation stories in the book of Genesis, and how most of the standard Christian interpretations of them as sexual do’s and don’ts are complete rubbish.
If you missed it, it was basically the opposite of this, which I saw online last week.
People had a lot of great comments about the post. Thanks for them, and for the comments about Peppermint Patty and Marcie, too!
In the final section of the Adam & Eve piece, Adam & Steve & Tofu, I included this photo, and offered a prize to the person who could explain its presence.
The picture is of the Scottish actor Alan Cumming, who in addition to being gay is also an outspoken vegan.
See what he did there?
A couple people eventually got it, but first across the line was Ellie Pyle. Well done, Ellie. As a prize here’s Alan Cumming telling a story and then singing Billy Joel. (Please enjoy especially the way he says Bob Hope.)
If you enjoyed this and want to support my work (or my birth—54, huzzah!), my paypal is paypal.me/jimmcdsj, and my Venmo is:
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
If you need a little joy or distraction this week, here’s a little more of the wonder that is Taskmaster.
COMING LATER THIS WEEK: THINGS I’M LEARNING ABOUT SEX AS A MOSTLY CLUELESS MIDDLE-AGED MAN.
How’s that for a teaser? See you then!
These panel quiz shows were huge in the United States in the 1950s and 60s (What's My Line, To Tell the Truth, I've Got a Secret, Hollywood Squares, Match Game), then died out completely. Why did they survive in Britain? They're fun!
Thank you for spreading the gospel of Taskmaster, it's brought so much unbridled joy into our lives at a time when we needed it the most. I did watch some of the unwatchable US version and it made me cringe for us as a nation. But funny enough, we were at a hotel up in Providence, RI which apparently has a large Portuguese-American population, and we were flipping channels when lo and behold... Portuguese Taskmaster! No subtitles, but the format was so true to form that we were still able to follow along with the tasks if not the banter!