Let's Get Physical

Why Too Hot to Handle is unwatchable reality TV and Physical 100 is near perfect

I re-discovered reality TV during COVID in the same way that other people re-discovered binge drinking. To be clear, I also re-discovered binge drinking during COVID, but that would make for a much less interesting essay. The long and short of it is that BevMo delivers surprisingly quickly now and hangovers after 30 deliver even quicker.

In my re-entry into America’s collective guilty pleasure, I discovered two very different shows and devoured them both. The first was Too Hot To Handle (THTH). If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that a group of 10 hot, openly shallow people think they’ve signed up to get some steamy action on a tropical dating show, only to realize at the end of the first episode that they are not allowed to hook up with anyone in order to teach them how to form genuine connections. Enforcing this new rule is the worlds most Puritanical Amazon Alexa, a glowing cone called Lana. Lana periodically informs them which housemates have broken the rules, and how much the secret smooch or clandestine canoodling has cost the group. Over the course of the show, different configurations of bimbos and himbos couple up, hook up despite being told not to, break up, and hook up again. It’s like a re-telling of the Garden of Eden with an “all plastic surgery/steroids” cast set in the Caribbean. To mix things up, Lana will occasionally give a couple a literal green light via their smartwatches that tells them they are now allowed to hook up with no consequences. By the end of the series the initial prize money of 100k has dwindled down to half or maybe nothing, I stopped paying attention to the stakes when the horny contestants did, which was immediately. After a predictable grab bag of ill-advised shower sex, below-the-comforter tomfoolery, and the worlds most expensive makeouts, the group is left with not very much money and someone is declared the winner, I think. As context, Too Hot to Handle came out in April of 2020 and was immediately Netflix’s #1 show during the week of 4/20 (insert high school boys saying “niiiiice.”). Rotten Tomatoes gives the first season a smoldering 36%. I’ll unpack why this is too generous of a rating below.

Bookending my journey through the delights of Netflix’s finest reality TV shows was Physical 100 (P-100), which came out in January of 2023. P-100 is a South Korean reality TV competition series where 100 strong and impressive humans compete to be the last one standing. The contestants are a diverse and truly impressive looking group of men and women with an array of backgrounds including: CrossFitters, MMA fighters, bodybuilders, wrestlers, firefighters, gymnasts, stuntmen, dancers, and one hopelessly gangly man whose questionably relevant area of expertise is Zombie fight choreography. It’s Squid Game, meets a Tough Mudder competition, basically. If you enjoy watching the Olympics, The Hunger Games, MXC, or Battle Royale, you’ll find the premise captivating.

As they arrive, each contestant must find a ceramic bust of their jacked chest, a lovely chunk of symbolism, especially since if they’re eliminated they must later smash this bust with a sledgehammer. To give you a glimpse at the challenges, the very first one requires them to hang from a metal rig for as long as they can before their grip gives out. The winning contestants last for upwards of 15 minutes, which is truly insane if you’ve ever tried hanging from a bar at the gym. The challenges only get more intense and ridiculous from there, including a hybrid of wrestling/tag I wish we could have played in school, moving sandbags up stairs and across a rickety bridge like a Jacked Indiana Jones frantically prepping for a hurricane, pushing an enormous ship across a warehouse like a yoked re-enactment of the Illiad, and so on. Contestants alternate between competing against each other and periodically teaming up for group challenges. The games get progressively more insane as they test all the angles of fitness until there is just one person left: one athlete to rule them all.

While both of these shows are explicitly about the physicality of their contestants, I found the experience of viewing them to be worlds apart. On the surface, this is because one is an American-British dating show that’s edited to within an inch of its life while the other is a South Korean physical competition show done with enough focus and restraint that it looks like a Bong Joon Ho movie in comparison to its disposable American counterpart. Yet, as readers of this blog likely already know, I never settle for a surface level explanation. Nor should you! There is much more depth, meaning, and insight to be mined in the Moria that is modern reality TV. There are much older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world. Let’s venture down there.

The Integrity of the Premise

The fatal flaw of Too Hot To Handle is that its premise of is at war with itself. It’s a Miami Beach string bikini overlaid with a Puritanical straight jacket. On the surface this is the point: horny fuckboys and girls must learn to keep it in their pants. However, in practice, this makes for nearly unwatchable TV. Freakonomics’s Hot Take Economist in Chief Steven Dubner is likely frothing at the mouth just imagining the diametrically opposed incentives underlying this competition. In order to maximize profit they have to remain chaste. In order to maximize pleasure they have to lose a lot of money. With clashing incentives muddying everything, the result is neither the lusty rush of bathing suits coming off nor the wholesome arc of people learning to better themselves. It’s a dissonant and remarkably boring show where all of the sizzle quiets after the first episode, like a cast iron tray of fajitas sprayed down with a fire extinguisher by a paranoid uncle. Tellingly, as soon as the premise is sprung on the contestants by Lana’s robotic narration, the show becomes chaotic, contrived, and decidedly non-compelling.

You can tell the producers know this and realize it’s a problem because they start conspicuously intervening like the US military in Central America. They’ll blatantly put their thumb on the scale of the competition mid season and even mid episode at times to keep it interesting. For example, they’ll periodically kick off a contestant for the sin of not pairing off fast enough, even though not pairing off is an inevitable outcome for some people and is the most logical strategy to win the prize money. No mate, no temptation. Logic has no place on reality TV, however. These sexual “Noble gasses” are kicked to the curb for the crime of keeping their clothes on. Then, after kicking off people for not being horny enough for this chastity competition, they start cattle prodding the remaining contestants into getting hornier, literally throwing new hot people into the house just to see what will happen, the way you might chuck a fresh hamster into the enclosure of a boa constrictor who has been acting like a picky eater lately. What’s unintentionally hilarious is how often the new men and women fail to mix things up at all. Some appear openly spiteful to be there as a sexy substitute in the first place. After watching this show for more than one episode you feel like you’ve stayed at a dive bar too late. You are overtaken by the profound sadness of watching the dregs of a night out putrefy in real time as the drunkest, most foolish people left keep chasing the dragon that someone might open their legs for them. Someone play “Closing Time” and lower the curtain for God’s sake!

On the flip side, the premise of Physical 100 allows and explicitly encourages its contestants to do what they’re good at. This is such a low bar to clear that it’s nearly subterranean, but it’s also essential for making good television. The inverse would be unwatchable, which really speaks volumes to just how bad THTH is. Imagine if Physical 100 was forced to have THTH’s premise: a bunch of jacked individuals are in a house full of exercise equipment and are forbidden from exercising. It would be stagnant television. Thankfully Physical 100 encourages and rewards its contestants for using their bodies to perform impressive feats of strength, agility, and endurance. This creates an inherent amount of intrigue and momentum, where THTH instead generates gratuitous friction and gear grinding. The contrast truly speaks volumes. Too Hot to Handle assembles a bunch of self-professed fuckboys and girls, the kind who produce one night stand after another like they’re an IKEA factory, and then forbids them of using their one superpower. It’s a truly baffling choice that overstays its welcome with each episode. Where P-100 gains weight, depth, and people to root for as it goes on, THTH sputters, loses momentum, and eventually runs the boat aground in the shallows it’s so doggedly determined to dwell in.

How are the Bodies?

Reality TV is always going to be eye-candy. I think what matters most is not did the producers give me candy instead of the kale I asked for, but rather how appetizing the flavors of the candy are. Since both shows are about celebrating and exploring the primal physicality of the human body, let’s take a long hard look at how watchable this muscular dance really is in practice. In both shows this starts with the casting: what kind of bodies do the producers want us to look at?

All of the men on THTH have the same body type: basically real life GI-Joe action figures, with the Y shaped back and shoulders you’ve seen in every Marvel movie and and abdominals and obliques sharply defined enough to grate Parmesan cheese on. In some scenes I found myself marveling that they took a break from using their ab wheels and lat pulldown machines for long enough to film a reality TV show. It truly must have been an imposition on their busy workout schedules and cod and broccoli eating routines.

Even more so than the men, the women on THTH are “a type.” You can picture them pretty easily. They’re the kind you’ve probably seen shouting and stumbling on a Vegas sidewalk, taking coy selfies of their bikini’d splendor on a California beach, or in the babbling blur of a Nashville bachelorette party. They’re uniformly slim, top heavy, and surgically enhanced. Overall, there is a carefully cultivated performance of hyper-sexualized female heterosexuality that aggressively matches the stoic superhero aesthetic of the men.

Compared to THTH’s cookie cutter bodies, there is a remarkably refreshing diversity of bodies and body types of P-100, since the contestants come from a wide array of athletic backgrounds. For a fitness nerd like me, it was jaw-dropping to see the variety of specialized forms of strength the human body can achieve. I spent the first episodes just drinking in the spectrum of the physiques: a body builder who looks like a Mortal Kombat character, a jacked fire fighter who looks like a Chippendale dancer, a wrestler whose quads each have their own mini quad muscles the size of my entire leg, a prison guard with burly trapezius muscles that will haunt your dreams, several MMA fighters with the calm confidence and lean physiques that convey that their strength can be lethal. Then there are the diamonds in the rough: unassuming physiques that still end up performing well because of the contestants speed, brains, agility, or determination. There is a fitness Youtuber who can hold a heavy rope more calmy than South Korea’s top powerlifting champion, a CrossFitter and snowboarder who just wants it more, a mountain rescue professional to whom the contrived challenges of this show are nothing. I left each episode with a sense of awe and appreciation of the many beautiful forms a body can take, but also the variety of types of strength any given body can express. I won’t spoil the ending, but many of the athletes that make it the farthest aren’t the ones that look the most impressive shirtless.

Is the Physicality Fun to Watch?

Once you’ve assembled a lineup of spectacular physiques, it’s revealing what the shows encourage them to do.

In Physical 100 the contestants come from many different athletic backgrounds, but the wide variety of the challenges means the competition doesn’t privilege one type of body over another. This balance drives much of the intrigue. I needed to know exactly how the different types of strength would fare in different settings. The bodybuilders might have impressive physiques, but just how strong are they? The wrestlers are dominant on the mat, but how about when it comes to agility, leading a group, and thinking on your feet? Are the CrossFitters as well rounded as their AMRAP’d brains believe they are? In this way, it’s the real live human version of Spike’s Deadliest Warrior meets Discovery’s Animal Faceoff, giving you some juicy matchups like “who would win between a wrestler and a CrossFitter” or “fitness Youtuber vs dancer.”

One of the most fascinating games to watch involves two contestants wrestling for control of a big ball. This game takes place in one of two settings. One is a playground-style obstacle course encouraging parkour, running, and jumping. The other is a spartan mud pit ringed by tires, basically telling you to grapple in the mud like the ferocious hippo you are.

I won’t spoil all of the 50 1v1 matchups, but some interesting learnings from watching this were that the speedy contestant often overshot the ball out of the gate, wrestlers and rugby players have a huge advantage for knowing how to use their strength to mess with the other persons center of gravity , and MMA fighters are just scary. In one of the most entertaining and charmingly chivalrous moments of the show, an aspiring MMA fighter challenges his much older hero to play the ball game. He then asks him if he’s willing to not chase the ball at all and just do 3 minutes of fighting with MMA rules, with the winner getting the ball. The resulting television was thrilling and surprisingly heartwarming. P-100 generally shines at getting its impressive physiques to perform impressive feats of strength. The challenges are fun to watch and don’t consistently favor one type of physique or athletic expertise, allowing for some great dark horse and underdog moments.

Too Hot to Handle, on the other hand, is remarkably much less watchable than the autoplaying sizzle reel on the Netflix home screen would suggest. Viewing the first few episodes of season one, for example, I was struck by how sad and boring it is to watch stereotypically hot people do all of the preamble to hooking up while being discouraged from actually releasing the kraken. There is little to see and less still to care about. All of the contestants are so interchangeably insufferable that it’s hard to care about anyones fledgling romance or how they bristle beneath shackles of chastity. Baffled by the lack of watchable action, I felt like Jon Hammond in Jurassic Park summing up the abbreviated tour that his test guests’ experienced before the storm hit:

The premise of THTH drags so much that no amount of hot bodies can salvage it. It ends up feeling like a sort of contrived techno-Puritanism by the end. Despite claiming the purpose is to teach these lost sluts to better themselves, the implicit premise of the show is torturing them (and by extension us) with what they aren’t allowed to do. Watching other people engaging in a prolonged bout of edging is about as fun as it sounds. Conversely, when they transgress the rules as they always do, there’s no suspense as to if they’ll be caught (the cameras see all), or if they’ll be punished (they always lose money). Instead we are given these forced and dragged out “reveals” of who hooked up with who and just how much that tactical handjob cost the group. The narrative and bedroom climaxes also produce no real suspense or conflict, since we the audience have already seen the incriminating silhouettes in Navy Seal style sexual night vision just minutes prior. THTH repeatedly sabotages what little physical intrigue there was to start with, leaving you with no sympathy for anyone except yourself who will never get the hours you sunk into this show back.

The Character and Conflicts of the Contestants

American reality TV shows like THTH love nothing more than manufacturing drama between the contestants. This starts with casting, which matters to these shows more than voir dire does to successfully convicting a murderer. I can guarantee you that the casting directors of any of these shows promptly eliminate anyone that isn’t narcissistic and drama prone the way lawyers weed out problematic jurors. Assemble enough petty, manipulative, pretty people and you’ve built a pile of kindling just waiting for a psycho-sexual match to be thrown onto it. Indeed, once these drama kings and queens are in a house together and handed swimsuits, microphones, and an open bar, it doesn’t take long for the sparks to fly. Yet the watching THTH you can also repeatedly feel the force of the producers interventions, slamming couples together and ripping them apart like they’re sexy atoms in a particle accelerator for singles.

As contrast, Physical 100 has relatively little manufactured drama or even drama of any kind. I was honestly stunned by how polite, respectful, and kind the contestants were to each other. There is a lot of bowing, humility, and thoughtful discussions that would be out of place on an American show. I’m not sure how much of this is a cultural difference, but the competition was often so wholesome that it felt like I was watching the gym rats equivalent of The Great British Bakeoff. The closest thing to drama came when one male wrestler challenged another female wrestlers team to a competition, which she felt broke their implicit trust and camaraderie as high-level South Korean wrestlers. While this led to some sarcastic remarks and a frustrated aside to the producers via a confessional insert shot, nothing came of it and no love was lost. In general, the show lets the competition and the physical results speak for themself, which feels remarkably restrained compared to American reality TV.

Most revealingly on the character and conflict front, is what the P-100 contestants do with their down time. Where THTH contestants spend all of the time between parties and challenges (or so we’re told by the editing) pairing off in the swimming pool and talking shit about each other, the P-100 contestants spend it amicably chatting like a sports team between matches. When the surviving contestants are admitted to a lounge space full of protein powder, exercise equipment, and comfy chairs, it’s telling that the producers don’t goad them having sex, starting drama, or screaming about who betrayed who. Instead they show off some feats of strength, trade compliments, and gently rib each other in the way that anyone who’s played intramural sports has experienced. At one point one of them starts an impromptu box jump competition just to see who can jump the highest. It’s remarkably wholesome physical fun.

The Way it Handles Gender Dynamics

Assembling an Avengers caliber lineup of impressive male and female bodies and asking them to interact for over 100k in prize money is bound to bring up some intense feelings about gender. Both shows fumble this point but in interestingly different ways, that reveal different things about the cultures they come from and the audiences they’re for.

THTH is hilariously heteronormative, with the idea of a gay or bisexual contestant clearly dismissed from the boardroom discussions and focus groups that predated its inception. While such a contestant (or three) would make the show objectively more realistic and interesting with even more pairing possibilities and incentives, the producers clearly don’t want to touch anything other than hunk on bimbo action with a 10 foot pole. The result is a parade of toxic masculinity and dysfunctional heteronormative sex & dating stereotypes. This is briefly interesting from a sociological and anthropological perspective, but rapidly becomes a mind-numbing cliche the farther you get into a season. One of many things I found objectionable was how quickly contestants would pair off and when things (almost inevitably) went South, lament breaking off their “connection” with someone that by my reckoning they’ve only even known for 36 hours. The show also handles the nuances of sex and romance with this sophistication of a few high school boys.

P-100 grapples with a certain amount of sexism innate to the contestants, fitness, and perhaps (I’m not informed enough to say) South Korean culture in general. On one occasion, when forming teams, no one thinks the team with a few women can win in the sand bag relay race competition. Sexism then takes the L. The misogynistic team is humbled when the female-led team moves faster and with more urgency than their male competitors. In another moment, teams are reluctant to pair up with this same team with three women because they’re worried that the women won’t be strong enough to pull an enormous ship across a warehouse. There’s definitely some casually implicit sexism and dismissal of women’s strength flying around the warehouse setting, though I also think the show does a good job of showing (though perhaps not telling) that women can be just as physically strong and resilient as men. The female bodybuilders, wrestlers, and CrossFitters in particular put on a clinic in female empowerment. Sure, it doesn’t shatter the glass ceiling of reality TV, but I still I found it to be a breath of fresh air that the genre needs in the 21st century. Where P-100 ultimately comes up short is on equity, not equality. Impressive women are invited, showcased, and given chances to compete. However, the nature of many challenges often puts the women at a disadvantage compared to the men. A more equitable iteration on this formula could be scaling the workouts by gender the way CrossFit does, and/or having a male and female victor at the end of the show.

Editing is Everything

THTH is edited within an inch of its life. The show cuts rapidly between characters and parts of the house and is liberal with overlaying pop music on top of an endless sea of B-Roll of palm trees and establishing shots of the house. This frantic pace gives the show an impatient, “just shotgunned a tallboy of Four Loko” vibe.

P-100’s biggest flaw to my eyes is its editing. The pacing of some of the challenges drags and very much feels like a casualty of the editing process. Despite it being one of my favorite games to watch, I ended up growing tired of the ball wrestling game, which felt like it took up nearly 3 hours of television viewing time to conclude. Part of this must stem from the challenge of having 100 contestants to keep tabs on for the first few episodes, compared to a slender 10 for a season of THTH. I also can’t tell how much of my own impatience with P-100’s editing is being acclimated to much jumpier American reality TV shows. Perhaps South Korean television is just more patient and minimal with editing in general, so to my eyes it seems slow in comparison.

Cliques, Creatine, and Conclusions

The paradox of all reality TV is always how decidedly unreal it is. Just watch the credits of any episode and you’ll see a Star Wars title crawl’s worth of story editors whose entire job it is to a coax out a compelling narrative arc from hundreds of hours of mostly benign or chaotic footage. Both THTH and P-100 aren’t neutral or objective depictions of peoples behavior in any sense of those words. Their very character is the end result of thousands of casting, production, and editorial choices. What is left out is as important and consequential as what is included. Just as the editors of Tiger King left out Joe Exotic’s racism and drug use to try to paint him as a more likable folk hero, we have to wonder what the THTH and P-100 producers left on the cutting room floor to give us the physical spectacle we so voraciously devoured.

Both shows are Netflix productions. Their character is perhaps most emblematic of the networks unique ability to curate and green light new shows based on a very specific audience research. They only exist because Netflix believes they will appeal to a very specific sub-demographic of their viewers. With Netflix’s foray into the realm of reality dating, you can feel their calculated strategy at work. For years this type of programming had been the domain of network TV, with heavyweights like The Bachelor and Love Island gobbling up all the attention and therefore money. So it was natural that Netflix had to get in on the action with their own vapid dating series like Love is Blind, Indian Matchmaking, and Too Hot to Handle. Similarly, Netflix has been intentionally angling to capture South Korean viewership for years, since South Korea is the most online country in the world, with an internet penetration rate of 97%. Following the runaway success of Squid Game in South Korea and then around the world, green lighting a show like Physical 100 or Extraordinary Attorney Woo was a no brainer, the streaming equivalent of printing money. In this more economic light, the sobering conclusion is not that Physical 100 was good and Too Hot to Handle was bad, but just that that I fall into the target demographic for the latter but not the former.

I fully stand by my assertion that Too Hot to Handle was not for me. Like an NRA member living in a superglue factory, I’m sticking to my guns. I found many of its editorial choices baffling, frustrating, and unintentionally hilarious. Yet its very existence and subsequent renewal for four additional seasons is an indication that while it wasn’t for me, it certainly was for a lot of other people. To be fair, I had the same reaction to Selling Sunset. I think I just struggle to watch fake, cutthroat, and unlikable people pitted against each other for entertainment. My real life has enough frustrations in it that I don’t want to subject my precious free time to this type of psychological and emotional stress. However Selling Sunset was also such a runaway success for Netflix that it was renewed for 5 seasons and given spinoffs in Orange County and Tampa. It’s undeniable that this formula is working, even if it’s not working for me.

I also have to look into the mirror and acknowledge that despite openly loathing it, I willingly consumed not 1 but 2 entire seasons of Too Hot to Handle. Sure I could say that COVID and alcohol was involved in forcing my hand, but I still chose to consume this trashy TV and then spend hours writing about it. It clearly gave me something, otherwise I would have stopped watching entirely instead of hate watching it to the bitter, bikini bottom’d end.

We live in an age of utter content saturation. What we watch and don’t watch ends up saying a lot about us. Just spend more than 5 minutes at a party with someone who cannot believe you haven’t seen The Wire, The Sopranos, or episode 3 of The Last of Us and won’t shut up about why you just must watch it and you’ll know what I mean. As streaming services like Netflix get ever more clever and sophisticated with their audience research and data analytics, it seems we’re in for an age of series that are targeted with a sniper’s precision so they can penetrate new crevices of our lives while solidifying their existing strongholds.

When asked what Netflix’s biggest competition was, then CEO Reed Hastings’ answer was telling. He didn’t name Hulu or Disney+, but rather the 7-8 hours of sleep his viewers are still choosing to get. As this landscape of TV shows blankets our culture and begins to eclipse the very physical reality we live in, the only unique viewing choice you could possibly make becomes harder than ever: opting out of watching anything. This spells record profits for Netflix, Disney, and Apple. However for me, it’s just too bleak to handle.