Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Power Slap’ on TBS, a Show About Hitting People In The Face, and Also About Getting Hit In The Face

From football to hockey to mixed martial arts, there are numerous popular sports that try to draw a balance between skill and violence. Then there’s the Power Slap League, which is just guys hitting each other in the face. The new “sport” is the focus of Power Slap: Road to the Title, a new reality/competition on TBS..

POWER SLAP: ROAD TO THE TITLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An on-screen disclaimer warns viewers about the violent content they’re about to see, and discourages them from attempting to recreate on their own. This lasts surely no longer than the lawyers mandated, and then we quickly cut to a shot of the Las Vegas skyline at dusk.

The Gist: Violent subject matter aside, Power Slap: Road to the Title is a pretty by-the-book reality show. The first episode introduces a broad selection of competitors, and host/slap boss Dana White and his lieutenants watch intently as they pare down the field to a set that will live in a house together, train together, and eventually compete for a title. It could be a baking show or a dating show or a singing show. It’s slapping, though. Lots of slapping.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of?There’s a “drafting competitors to live in a house together during their title chase” format that I suppose recalls The Ultimate Fighter, among others, but if that show were boiled down to its purest, dumbest, most violent form. It’s freebase reality TV.

Our Take: Did you know that “slap fighting” is a real sport? That’s true, technically speaking. It has existed before Power Slap: Road to the Title, and will presumably exist after this show has come and gone. The slapping that takes place during the show is licensed and regulated by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, and there are some baseline health and safety protocols that the competitors are bound by.

Right, so anyways, in the first sixty seconds or so of the first episode, we see a competitor get knocked out cold, visibly displaying the kind of “fencing” response in his fingers that is typically associated with a severe concussion. (If you watched the Miami Dolphins’ Tua Tagovailoa convulse on the field earlier in this NFL season, you might recognize it.)

At some level, there’s a suggestion of a prurient excitement to watching people slap each other in the face as hard as possible. It sounds silly, and might even recall the whimsy of How I Met Your Mother’s “Slap Bet” episodes. Rest assured, though, there’s no whimsy here. The slapping here is treated as a serious sport by everyone involved, and as a viewer, it gets depressing quickly. Even if you go in with an open mind–something I’m not suggesting you do–it quickly calls to mind the feeling of being on your fourth day of a bachelor party trip to Las Vegas: dehydrated, hung over, broke, and seriously considering every one of your life decisions. No one should spend more than three days on a bachelor party trip to Las Vegas, and no one should watch Power Slap expecting anything other than a lot of slaps and yelling about how good the slaps are.

“No one should spend more than three days on a bachelor party trip to Las Vegas, and no one should watch Power Slap expecting anything other than a lot of slaps and yelling about how good the slaps are.”

That the show is hosted by UFC president Dana White–who was caught on film slapping his wife at a party on New Year’s Eve, an incident he has issued a public apology for–certainly doesn’t help. White’s grim, glowering persona is central to his mixed martial arts empire at UFC, but here it just suggests that these were the fighters who weren’t good enough for the octagon and can slap each other around for some screen time.

Sex and Skin: No sex or skin. Just good, wholesome, family-friendly concussions and screaming.

Parting Shot: The residents of the “Power Slap House” selected, White and his professional slap-fighter trainers–”the experts in the sport”–enthuse about how good the competition is going to be and how great the competitors are, then White reveals the championship belt they’ll be competing for. It’s going to be a long season. (Of slapping.)

Sleeper Star: The referees and doctors get some good screen time in, occasionally stopping slap-fights because someone might get hurt.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Both of these guys are really energetic competitors, but The One-Eyed Wolf couldn’t get medically cleared,” White explains, in the cheerful tones of Richard Dawson playing the post-apocalyptic game show host pitting competitors in a fight to the death in The Running Man.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Listen, if you’re the kind of person who’d like this sort of thing, I don’t think you’re reading reviews anyways. For the rest of us, I’ll just say: it’s not any better than it sounds at first.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.