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For all those seeking entertainment, you've come to the right place. For those sickos amongst you who specifically take joy in seeing comedians humiliating themselves while earnestly trying their best, all while trying to win a golden replica of my large head - good news! That's kind of our whole thing!

The Taskmaster, Tom Gleeson

Taskmaster Australia is an Australian edition of the UK program, premiering on Network Ten in 2023.

Featuring Tom Gleeson as the Taskmaster, and Tom Cashman as the Taskmaster's Assistant, here five comedians^note and the occasional children's television presenter trying to reinvent himself as a bad boy battle it out to see who can win a golden trophy in the shape of Tom Gleeson's head, via winning various tasks in and around the Taskmaster Retreat^note filmed the same location as Taskmaster New Zealand's 'Taskmaster Ranch', but referred to differently. The first English-language adaptation to localise its title and second antipodean edition.

Contestants

• Season 1: Danielle Walker, Jimmy Rees, Julia Morris, Luke McGregor, Nina Oyama
• Season 2: Aaron Chen, Concetta Caristo, Mel Buttle, Peter Helliar, Rhys Nicholson
• Season 3: Anne Edmonds, Jenny Tian, Josh Thomas, Lloyd Langford, Wil Anderson

This adaptation provides examples of:

• And Zoidberg:
  • Jimmy Rees is not a professional comedian, and so the series one cast are once introduced along the lines of:
    Four comedians, and one children's television presenter trying to reinvent himself as a bad boy!
  • In episode 6 of series one, Tom Cashman refers to the cast as "four Millennial comedians and Julia Morris".
• Buried Alive: in episode 3's "thing you'd want to be buried with" prize task, Jimmy Rees and Luke McGregor both anticipate this, and so bring their phone and a shovel, respectively.
• Call-Back:
  • Danielle's claim in the "age or de-age yourself" task that she's 300 years old is accepted by Tom Gleeson as a call-back to her life montage in the first episode showing her dying at 410 years of age.
  • Nina's $50 bet with Tom Cashman that she'd win the whole season is referred to multiple times throughout the season as it becomes abundantly clear that she has no chance of winning the bet, and she brings in the $50 in the final episode for Tom.
  • During the "sink the bowling ball" task, Danielle makes a call-back to Luke's assertion in an earlier task that he didn't want to jump in the lake because bacteria might get into his butthole by saying that she fell into the lake off-screen while retrieving the bowling ball and "my asshole is in heaps of trouble now".
  • Luke says during the sixth episode's live task that the medal he drew on his monster for the "make your monster more prestigious" part is one for sex, which Tom Gleeson recognizes as a call-back to Luke's montage in the first episode claiming that he won the Sex Grand Final.
• Full-Name Basis: In the first episode, Gleeson makes a point of always addressing and referring to Cashman in full as "Tom Cashman", as if to say that there's room for only one "Tom" on the show and he's got dibs.
• In-Series Nickname: In later episodes, Gleeson settles on referring to Cashman as "Lesser Tom".
• Literal Metaphor: A couple tasks are realisations of idiomatic or metaphorical phrases like "let the cat out of the bag" (idiomatic meaning: revealing a secret by mistake — the actual task is to retrieve the toy cat from one of many identical bags).
• Loophole Abuse:
  • In "Foot Juice", one of the tasks is to fill a glass of orange juice. Next to the glass is a bucket of oranges, but the contestants can only touch the oranges with the items on the bench that range from a weight to a pair of Crocs. Julia ignores the oranges and the items on the bench and simply gets a carton of orange juice from the kitchen to pour into the glass, since nothing in the task said the contestants couldn't use or touch items that were not on the bench. She wins the task.
  • In "Cricketmaster", given the task to "fly this thong^note that is, a flip-flop the furthest distance", Julia Morris opts to stick the thong in the fly of her pants and run with it, 'flying' it that way. The Taskmaster accepts this interpretation, and Julia runs away with the task, running over 200 metres before the thong falls out, whereas the next furthest distance was only about 40 metres.
  • In "BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM", the contestants are given the task to sink a bowling ball with the twist that the bowling ball floats in water. Most of the contestants submerge the ball underneath water by making it heavier or putting it underneath something heavy, but Luke instead just puts the ball into a kitchen sink. His interpretation gets three points.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: One task in episode 3 asks the contestants to make the most persuasive cricket appeal. Unfortunately, only half the contestants know what a cricket appeal even is.
• Tempting Fate: Nina becomes so cocky about her performance in the "let the cat out of the bag" task that she makes a $50 bet with Tom Cashman that she not only will win this task but will also win the whole season. Not only does she not win the task (because Danielle did even better than her), but she comes in next to last in the overall season rankings with the majority of her task performances being defined by her inability to read or follow the task instructions properly.
• Visual Pun: "Lucky With a Sausage" has a task where the contestants have to convincingly age or de-age themselves. The task is introduced lying among a pile of buttons and a 100 dollar US banknote (i.e. a Benjamin). Luke questions the setup of the task and is able to conclude that it represents Benjamin Button, the literary character who is born physically elderly and becomes physically younger as he ages.

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