Let us bee the ones to spell this out for you

Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee seems like a safe bet. It started as a Zoom/YouTube show during the pandemic. And it’s since morphed into a series of live shows at various comedy festivals and an eight-part New Zealand television series (with a second season of eight episodes starting next week!). Now, there’s a local version (of another eight episodes) on the ABC and iView.

You might say that Guy Mont is the kind of show which we should be spending our taxes on; it’s done its time, it’s worked its way up, and it’s built a fan base. So, why, given all that, is it so unsatisfying to watch?

Well, here’s (one of) the problem(s) with safe bets that have done their time: by the time they make it big, they’re often pretty much exhausted from the effort required to make it big. By our count, there have been about 40 episodes or live shows of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee in the past five years. Which is a lot. Even shows which have a really great, repeatable format are running out of ideas after 40 shows. And this isn’t a show with a really great, repeatable format.

Put it this way, if you like spelling competitions and don’t mind a bit of comedy, this is probably a show you’re prepared to watch again. But if you’re mainly there for the comedy, having to put up with a bunch of people earnestly and seriously spelling out words is a bit of a drag. Because, fundamentally, there’s nothing funny about people spelling words.

Even if the people spelling the words are funny, or the way the funny people are asked to spell the words is funny, or if there are funny definitions of the words, or funny messages of support to help the funny people spell the words, or if there’s Aaron Chen doing something a bit surreal and left field over there in the corner, the actual bit where the funny people spell the words is still not funny. And in a spelling bee, even a comedy one, spelling words is the main point of the show.

This isn’t Would I Lie To You or Taskmaster where the comedian contestants can get laughs out of completing the show’s challenges, or Have You Been Paying Attention? where the contestants can give funny answers to the questions. In a spelling bee, there are almost no laughs to be had from spelling the words wrong. It’s like when Working Dog did Audrey’s Kitchen. Sure, they could parody the mannerisms of TV chefs and the conventions of cooking shows, but they couldn’t do funny recipes, because that doesn’t work. They could either do serious recipes that resulted in edible food, or recipes which had funny ingredients, like concrete or petrol, which would kill you if you ate them. And no one wants to air a show with recipes that will kill people.

Hybrid comedy/game shows like Guy-Mont can get decent laughs out of banter between the regulars, but with a mostly new set of contestants each week, there’s less of an opportunity to do that. Guy-Mont also doesn’t have a “character” host, like Tom Gleeson, who (like him or loathe him) gets laughs out of ripping into the contestants on Hard Quiz. Yes, Montgomery and Chen do take the piss out of the contestants occasionally, but you need more than that to make this really funny.

So, in Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, the ABC has bought a show with fundamental flaws in its format that ensure it’s less funny than 50 minutes of comedy should be, and which feels like its exhausted every possibility of doing a funny spelling bee even before it’s aired on Australian television. Which isn’t a great vibe for its debut on Australian television.

You also have to wonder, after Win the Week and countless similar comedy/quiz hybrids, when the ABC’s going to realise that while these types of shows are affordable on their limited budget, they’re not the kinds of show people want to see more of. Shows with higher laugh rates are what we want, not shows where comedians’ talents are wasted spelling the word “dream”.