\^Why instead of what 🙂
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They are cheap to produce, because you don’t have the write a script. An outline will do for most.
Most of them translate only roughly into the US, e.g. because they reference news, culture or common knowledge from the UK or are harder to get into (Countdown/ 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown are a fever-dream of boredom if you hear it explained).
Also, any given show has to compete with the current national TV program and in the US programs are….lets say more attention grabbing in general. So a good idea gets a make-over to help it land in the new market.
I think the current US equivalent of the UK’s personality-driven panel/ game shows is Dropout.tv, the service that CollegeHumor became. I’d be surprised if they weren’t already in legal discussions related to starting some Taskmaster-style content.
Panel shows were actually largely invented in the US, and the format was fairly popular for many years during the early days of television. Shows like *What’s My Line?*, *I’ve Got A Secret*, and *To Tell The Truth* were big in the 50s and 60s.
They just petered out over the decades as talk shows and sitcoms became more popular in the US. There’s lots of theories, but no real smoking gun, as to why. Maybe it’s cultural, maybe it’s financial, but we just don’t know.
And that said, we do still have some. *Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!* airs weekly on NPR, we’ve had two versions of *Whose Line Is It Anyway?*, and *To Tell The Truth* has been rebooted every couple decades. There were 600 episodes of *@midnight* on Comedy Central, and it has evolved into *After Midnight*, which airs on CBS.
We don’t like games without prizes.
I’ve also noticed that UK panel shows seem to be kind of “incestuous” insofar as there are only a group of about a dozen or more comedians who make up the panels on every show. Aisling Bea, Romesh Ranganathan, Jimmy Carr, Bill Bailey, David Mitchell, Jason Manford, Sara Pascoe, Josh Widdicombe, Jo Brand, Roisin Conaty, Joe Lycet, Sara Millican, Johnny Vegas, Richard Ayodae, Holly Walsh — you know, the usual suspects. Just pick 3-5 of them, and one to host, and you’ve got a new panel show. This core group seem to appear on all of them.
I’m not sure we have in the US a similar group of comedians who are both well-known enough to be household names, and congenial enough to be willing to make a career out of always appearing with the same people again and again.
I’d argue that over the past several decades, the late-night talk show has taken that spot for Americans. Standups come on to test out new material, they play the occasional wacky game, there’s a bit of banter. Different format than most panel shows, but the same general idea. The writers write a monologue and prepare a few lead-in questions, maybe a sketch or a game, and the host and guests take it from there.
The occasional panel show has done well in the US – I’d say that After Midnight is probably the strongest-performing one in a while, and it’s essentially a classic panel game show with a social media theme. But I think it really does come down to what we all grew up with. The late night show had an indelible place in American society from the mid 60’s through the mid-2000’s, and they still do decently well. Panel shows would need to compete with primetime programming or take a late night show, or else they’d become daytime programming or become popular on some other network. Which has certainly happened – look at Hollywood Squares for a long-running example.
I’m sure that I read that “I have I got news for you” is being shipped out to the US. Not sure how it will work in the US as the UK version is based pretty much on the two regular panelist’s.
American humour and sensibilities are different.
American humour tend to be showbiz hog the limelight and be the best. UK is self depreciating, being the underdog is where it’s at.
Translating to panel shows, it’s all about the win for the US, all about the best gag for the UK.
Map that on to shows and you can see why UK has a lot of them.
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