Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hotties’ On Hulu, A Lighthearted Dating Show Where Potential Couples Make And Eat Really Spicy Food

It seems that watching people do things while they have snot dripping down their faces and sweat pouring down their foreheads is all the rage, given the popularity of Hot Ones, the YouTube series that generated a game show two years ago and more than one pop culture parody in scripted series. So why not take this concept and extend it to dating? Hotties is not made by the Hot Ones crew, but it sure carries on the spirit of that show.

HOTTIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Host Jade Catta-Pretta exits an Airstream trailer in the middle of the desert. “It’s hot out, and you know what that means… Hot, pantsless people are chafing it for the ‘Gram!”

The Gist: Hotties is a dating show that’s also a food show, but it’s also, more than anything else, a comedy show. Two sets of singles meet up outside a food truck in the desert. Their blind date basically consists of making a particular spicy dish inside their respective food trucks. They have 75 minutes to complete the task, but every 15 minutes, there will be a “Heat Challenge” to distract them.

Catta-Pretta is watching all of this unfold from the air-conditioned Airstream via “hidden” cameras, and she ends up judging the date by how good the chemistry was between the two singles, as well as how good the food they made tastes. The winning couple gets $2500 to use on a second date or to split and, as Catta-Pretta says “never see each other again.”

In the first episode, the couples are Paul and Rose — outgoing from the start — and Diego and Laith — Laith took some time to warm up, but by the end, the two were feeding each other honey on their fingers. They’re supposed to have a “sausage party,” so all of the suggestive jokes about sausages and “massaging your meat” apply. The challenges are: Eating pickles covered in hot chili pepper flakes, a devil’s tongue red pepper, and slices of watermelon covered in ghost pepper flakes. Can they maintain their sexiness while their eyes are watering and snot is coming out their noses?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Hotties is Blind Date but with a much smaller budget, combined with the Hot Ones YouTube series.

Our Take: Like Blind Date, you’re not watching Hotties for any other reason except to laugh at the goofy exploits of these strangers as they try to bond over cooking and sweating out eating challenges that are in the millions of Scoville units. Even the “dating” part of this dating show is minimal because the couples barely get to know each other before they’re thrown into the fire (almost literally) and told to cook together.

You have to have outgoing couples for this to work. Sure, there can be an occasional Laith in the mix, a person who is seemingly reserved until opened up by the right person. But you just can’t have both sides of the couples be Laiths, or the show just won’t fly. So Rose is a goof who clams that men think that she’s “a lot,” and Paul is way too arrogant for his looks. Diego likes to show off his flexible tongue. But if it weren’t for these outlandish personalities, the time in the truck would be brutal.

Catta-Pretta, who hosted the most recent iteration of The Soup, is up to the challenge of filling in the rest of the time with funny lines. Like when she sees Laith and Diego holding sausage casing that’s being filled, she quips, “that’s too many hands on one sausage. That should be illegal.” Her one-liners will be what keeps things from being repetitive as the episodes play out, but then again, are you really going to do more than just use this as a palate cleanser between seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale?

Sex and Skin: Of course, there’s lots of talk of sexy stuff, but as you’d expect, there’s not much you can do in a food truck with cameras all over the place.

Parting Shot: We get a postscript about the two couples. One of them genuinely made us laugh with their decision on what to do with the money for winning the show.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the set designers who put the kiddie pool outside each food truck. Remember, the trucks themselves don’t have air conditioning, so contestants can flop fully-clothes into that tiny pool in order to cool off their mouths and bodies.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Let’s see if they want to hook up when their asses are en fuego,” says Catta-Pretta. It’s a funny line but not so funny imagery.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hotties is the kind of show that definitely helps you turn your brain off for 21 minutes, if that’s what you’re in the mood for. But it’s also genuinely funny, especially when couples dripping snot on their first date drink bottles of ranch to cool their palates. Blech.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.