A Mixed Bag

Taskmaster has ended up as one of my absolute favorite shows on television. One of the reasons for this is because it is so difficult to box it into a given category of light entertainment shows on television. On paper I suppose it is seen as a panel show, but it could just as easily be seen as a form of sitcom or perhaps a reality show to some degree. Or why not a sports series? The appeal of following Taskmaster to me is that in part it doesn't feel like watching a television show, you peak into a whole universe of its own.  * Taskmaster is created by the comedian Alex Horne , who also serves as the taskmaster's assistant  and the show saw its premiere in 2015 in the UK. Shortly thereafter the concept spread around the globe and currently there have been 13 countries airing their own version of the show, among them Bäst i Test (BiT)  here in Sweden and when it comes to the reviewing part I will limit myself to the original UK version and BiT, the other international ve...

Disclaimer: Please be aware of the fact that in a commentary such as this series, "spoilers" may be plentiful. This may go without saying, but for this show I still want to explicitly point it out.   * At first viewing,  How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) didn't seem very special. It's premiere was shortly after Friends had wrapped up their business and this was yet another show set in New York (were there no other cities in the US at all?) circling around the lives of a young group of friends. The main difference seemed to be that the gang in HIMYM frequented a bar instead of a coffee shop but other than that it was hard to not dismiss the show as some form of rip off of what had come just before it. "Make up your own format, dude." Adding to that, the premise was that we as an audience were forced to listen to an older version of the main character taking an awfully  long time to answer the question of the show's title. Season after season we were baited wi...

If I had to choose one sitcom to pick as the king among them, I would have to choose Scrubs.  It's the show I would like to have written, it's absolutely the one I often imagined myself participating in, in one role or another. Then again, I don't think you can select a single sitcom as the best in general, no one of these shows I love is perfect and neither is Scrubs which will become apparent below.  Also, I'm biased, Scrubs is "my" show in terms of age - in its run I'm a teenager and a young adult. Me and my friends adopt the show as ours and during the years we quote stuff from the series endlessly. "Eagle", "Brown bear" "So's your face" et cetera are staples within the banter in our group. My way of looking at the shows original run on air is undeniably through rose tainted glasses - it wouldn't really be fair to all the others if this would be cleared out as the best among them, but it is indeed my personal favor...

I was a bit too young to fully experience the frenzy that was Friends while it was on air. I watched the show, but from a child's perspective where I couldn't truly understand what was going on. Friends was funny adults doing funny stuff and it was a hopeless task to get any significant amount of the references and general vibe of the show. Still I got that this series would be a defining example of what TV was for my generation or at least the one right above my own. Everyone knew Friends, everyone remembers it. Fondly or otherwise.  Yes, it's a bit tricky writing about Friends because it's a show so many have had opinions on. Either because one can't get enough of it or precisely because one has gotten enough of the thing. This is a show people love to hate, so much so that they kind of forget to judge it fairly. To my mind, they hate more on the hype and the general frenzy that was Friends than the actual content that the show brought out. The latter is the only ...

When it comes to television my go to genre is definitely sitcoms. These comedic shows arrive in various formats and in different styles of comedy, but if sitcoms would be distilled into something they all have in common I would say it is to be a show centered around a group of people, following a distinct segment of their lives. We enter at one stage of it and exit at another, and during that time we have seen a certain development taking place where the characters may have grown into mature adults, entering parenthood or moved from the region they started in. It varies greatly in practice, but in essence a sitcom is not meant to have any greater plot than the events of life in general. It's Sims as a TV-version, but with providing laughter to the viewer as an aim instead of an interactive experience for the player.  * As with every genre you can be a fan of it and still dislike certain elements or defining parts of it - but with comedy this is especially relevant to point out. A ...