I was genuinely excited when Channel 4 announced that Taskmaster sidekick and comic band leader Alex Horne was set to front a brand new spin-off centring on his ill-fated efforts to step out from the all-encompassing presence of Greg Davies’ looming comedy shadow. The idea of ambitious people striving towards a dream they will never see fulfilled is at the heart of the classic British sitcom, and given the obvious appeal of Horne and his comically deadpan Horne Section quintet from panel show appearances and some critically acclaimed live shows, you couldn’t have wished for a more auspicious setup.
There’s so much comedy heritage on which to draw, too. The quirky songs of Flight of the Conchords, the in-media critiques from Episodes, the unfulfilled ambitions from The Larry Sanders Show or The Trip, all trying to blend with the surreal kookiness of House of Fools or The Mighty Boosh. Certainly, The Horne Section TV Show’s debt to many of its comedy predecessors is clear, even if how they manifest is little short of disastrous.
Essentially, there are two Horne Section TV Shows: one is the fictional in-show live format which sees host Alex interview a variety of guest stars each week, the other is the actual sitcom of the same name that forms the subject of this review. The two essentially share an identical function (that’s part of the gag), in that we, the real audience, are watching Horne striving to be free from the yoke of his Taskmaster servitude in the same way that his fictional audience is witnessing the same gambit performed during the comedian’s disastrous live broadcasts.
And yet for all its talk of Alex and co. stamping their mark on the televisual scene, I’ve rarely seen a sitcom that has felt so unalterably static. Sure, there have been many slow-burners that don’t see the furthering of any overarching plot as a burning necessity (Sean Lock’s surreal slice-of-life 15 Storeys High is a good example), but The Horne Section TV Show isn’t just meandering and slow, it’s completely lacking in any discernible identity. Come away from watching all six meaningless episodes and you’ll be utterly non-plussed as to what the point of any of it actually was. Horne wants to have his own talk show, he gets it, we see glimpses of its struggles, and then it’s over, with few lessons learned and even fewer laughs along the way.
All of this could be excused if there were sights and sounds to enjoy while the comedy train pootles along through its non-existent plotline, but the show’s landscape is so barren and lifeless that there seem to have been almost no concessions made to actual audience enjoyment. Often it feels as though we, the viewers, are just an afterthought, voyeuristically looking in on a production written so thinly and performed so lifelessly that it appears as though a three-minute short has inexplicably been extended into six twenty-minute episodes. The Horne Section TV Show is still in the rehearsal room, and we’re leaning by the open door listening in to every duff note and out-of-synch drumbeat.
Yes, the writers were right to lean into the Horne Section’s surrealist roots, but the tone is so bland and confused it just comes across as bizarre and clunky rather than deliberately and knowingly surreal. It’s a genre that’s infamously tricky to pull off, but thanks to aimless direction, scattergun writing and listless performances by almost all involved (being deliberately amateurish as actors does not excuse this failing), Horne’s musical sitcom just feels oppressively flat.
Occasionally a welcome musical number will kick in apropos of nothing in an effort to inject some life into this walking corpse of a show, but all that does is remind you that you could be watching far superior musical comedies in the form of Flight Of The Conchords or Toast Of London instead. A pointless ditty about peas is about as good The Horne Section TV Show gets on that front, but most musical interludes outstay their welcome long before any identifiable punchline ever lands.
Often there’s a sense that there are in fact two sitcoms operating at once, one defined by the kooky musical world of Horne and his group of utterly indistinguishable troubadours and the other inhabited by characters more at home in a sub-Episodes style media satire, where twenty-something runners stare at their iPhones all day (groan) and roll their eyes whenever anyone has the temerity to suggest they do some work. Sometimes it’s surreal Alex Horne singing songs about the alphabet and making his band members perform arbitrary musical assignments, and sometimes it’s “look at these dozy Millennials with their funny haircuts and lack of proper motivation”. Two atonal melodies smashed together, neither of them making for a particularly good tune.
And as for the jokes – perhaps it’s just me, but there is something seriously amiss with a sitcom’s writing when you find yourself actively rolling your eyes towards the heavens at the latest “gag” about the bassist having a “magic bald patch” or guest star Martin Kemp recalling a story about how he and Anneka Rice once had a bad trip on magic mushrooms and live in fear of a relapse. This is sub-Tom Green stuff, and it’s utterly unworthy of everyone involved. A segment in which kindly, shiny-faced clinician Dr. Ranj Singh appears on Alex’s in-show chat vehicle revolves almost entirely around the good doctor occasionally getting infuriated because he wrongly believes the host keeps calling him a plum. This happens twice before the interview ends, and we sit there feeling as baffled as Alex’s paltry excuse for an audience that no more excruciating material could be wrung from this damp rag of a script.
This is hugely indicative of The Horne Section TV Show’s greatest failing, in that it has no idea what it’s trying to do, say or send up. Nothing truly leads to anything else or has any consequence, even though there is some necessity to further the plot because events are broadly serialised rather than purely episodic. Instead, the writing just reverts back to clunky Deus ex machina jumps to prop up the faltering storyline, stumbling through to the next episode by letting giving Alex what he wants (or what the plot requires ) without having him earn it through on-screen interactions or actual plot points.
Alex gets his show in the first place because a boring Channel 4 exec just accidentally happens to green-light it, but he only stays on air because he gets lucky that one of the band’s songs is turned into a viral TikTok dance trend that helps the network hit its 16-34 demographic. No mention is made before or since of this serendipity, it’s just bolted on and then utterly ignored.
And so what we’re left with is a discordant mess, a melange of styles and ideas all clashing against one another, the result of which is a disharmonious melody that only serves in giving its audience a mild headache. Every time a joke fails to land you begin to wonder if the fault lies with the audience, that there might be something inherently wrong with us for not understanding why a three-minute segment about a car having stabilisers is in fact a tour de force worthy of Mitch Hedberg. The Alex Horne TV Show feels like an experiment that has been allowed to run into a full-length disaster, banking on the relative cachet of its central star but never earning its stripes as a sitcom, a musical showcase or anything in between.
Flight of the Conchords is still good, though. Maybe go watch that instead.
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