In the not-so-distant past, you would have had to bribe most people to get them to confess to being committed users of the social media site Reddit. As a Redditor of several years, let’s just say that I didn’t use to be particularly vocal about my daily consumption of “subreddits” (individual communities on the site) such as Malicious Compliance (mistakes people make at work, passive-aggressively), or the fairly self-explanatory Am I The Asshole? (AITA). These days, though, Reddit isn’t just for people who live in basements – everyone seems to be on there, rubbernecking in threads like Open Marriage Regret or just indulging in TV fandom. And now they’re even making TV shows based on it.
Jimmy Carr’s Am I the A**hole? (asterisks aside, no one in the programme can decide whether it’s pronounced “asshole” or “arsehole”) isn’t the first television show based on a subreddit – that award goes to the CW’s Two Sentence Horror Stories – but it may just be the laziest. The concept is simple: members of the public, who may or may not be online content creators, tell a story of possible assholery to host Carr and panellists GK Barry and Jamali Maddix in front of a studio audience. The trio then decide who is the biggest asshole (arsehole?) of the day, gently ribbing them in the process (sometimes not-so-gently, too – this is Mr Bad Taste, Jimmy Carr, after all). Imagine if Would I Lie to You? was 50% less wholesome and you’ve got the general shape of the thing. It is, says Carr, “the show that does for arseholes what Naked Attraction did for, well, arseholes”.
