Way back in February, Netflix found dating-show success with Love Is Blind, an initially silly but ultimately kind of bleak dating show “experiment” that had contestants—subjects? Victims?—agree to marry one another sight unseen. What followed those quickie proposals was the real grim meat of the series, just darkly comical enough to rescue the show from outright tragedy. It was a big hit, giving everyone something to chatter about as a disappointing season of The Bachelor wound down.
That was ages ago, though. Specifically, two months of COVID panic ago. So it’s high time we had another heterosexual fiasco to devour. Lo, Netflix seems to answer those desperate pleas to the content heavens with the arrival of its new dating series, Too Hot to Handle (premiering April 17), which places a bevy of young singles in a house on a beach somewhere (I think it’s Hawaii, but it could be any isle in the South Pacific) and tells them to get to know one another.
Naturally, there is a catch: an Alexa-style virtual assistant device, called Lana, informs the sexies that they have to refrain from any kind of sexual activity. Meaning, any kissing, fondling, or—god forbid—otherwise will result in a fine, subtracted from the $100,000 prize money pot. There’s no self-love allowed either. This is to be a carnal-free environment, if these young hardbodies can, well, handle it.
The motive for this twist is, ostensibly, therapeutic. We’re led to believe that all the contestants have placed too high, or at least too immediate, a priority on sex in their dating lives outside the Too Hot to Handle House house. Thus, Lana the robot is trying to encourage them to learn how to get to know a person for something beyond mere sexual opportunity. If done right, that’s a worthy enough initiative. There’s nothing wrong with the sex, of course, but perhaps the obsessive pursuit of it has, for these particular people, blinded them to the breadth of romantic possibility available to them.
Only, that’s not really what Too Hot to Handle is about. The show doesn’t take the time to be about that—or, really, to be about anything. Its eight episodes stumble by, and then the series is done like it never even started. We’re meant to have felt something, either titillation or social enlightenment or both, but the show is utterly unable to conjure any sort of sentiment or mood beyond frustration. This may sound silly, and rather obvious, to say about a show like this, but Too Hot to Handle is terrible—shoddily made and deeply uninteresting. The contestants are all bores, all clearly out to boost their influencer clout, and are awful at the game of reality show pretending.
The show’s conceit doesn’t work because it was never meant to. The no-physical-intimacy rule is routinely broken, producer meddling being the only conceivable explanation. The contestants try to act as though they just can’t resist each other, but those moments of passion are as canned as the hackish voiceover narration attempting to offer wry commentary on all the wacky stuff we’re witnessing. This is sub-basement reality TV, hastily made with the worst kind of cynicism—the one that assumes us dumdums will gulp down whatever slop we’re fed. That calculation is often sadly right, but Too Hot to Handle carries that presumption too far.
Really the show’s worst offense, though, is how flagrantly, and ineptly, it rips off one of the crown jewels of present-day reality television, Love Island. That series, from the United Kingdom (though inevitably inferior American and Australian versions do exist), also puts a bunch of fit twenty-somethings in a getaway villa together and sets them amorously at each other. There is a structure to the show—a repeated process of coupling up and re-coupling—but nothing so crass or unenforceable as a no-sex rule. And it unfolds over a luxurious, utterly indulgent, occasionally agonizing amount of time. The fifth season, which ran last summer, was 49 episodes long, a two-month sprawl that represented slow cooking at its finest.
Too Hot to Handle mimics the aesthetics of Love Island but completely misses what makes the latter show so bizarrely compelling: it’s the intense investment, built episode by episode until you’ve lost all sense of temporal geography. Did that boy enter the villa with that other boy, or was he one of the original crew? When did so and so go on their dumb date to the beach—was it two episodes ago, or ten?
Love Island is a trip in the narcotic sense, total and immersive and without border. Its cycle of morning lounging and nighttime cocktail hour—from barely clothed to tightly clothed, from barefoot padding by the pool to stiletto clomping across the wooden deck—lulls you into a trancelike stasis. Every few episodes, the show shakes you awake for a shocking elimination or re-coupling. But it’s a careful attendant; it gently soothes you back into your milky spell once the drama has rolled through.
Netflix’s show doesn’t do any of that. It rushes right to the supposedly naughty stuff and then ends, without ceremony or consequence. It will, at best, offer one day’s worth of passing diversion, at a time so craving of distraction. And that quick flash won’t be a satisfying experience. (Double entendre intended, maybe.) I won’t tell you not to watch it, but you could do better. Meaning, you could instead hop on over to Hulu and dive into Love Island, which, personally, has proven an invaluable respite from days of stress and tedium.
I was first introduced to the show by a good friend who is from the U.K. For two seasons—four and five—we would watch an episode or two whenever I could make it over to his apartment, strenuously avoiding spoilers in the ample time between viewings. Though the original U.K. broadcast of the fifth season ran near daily from last June through the end of July, our watching of it didn’t conclude until January of this year. It took forever, which was part of the weird fun. (It was also helpful to have a Brit on hand to decipher and diagnose various regional accents, like a docent explaining the meaning behind the art.)
Now that my friend and I are stuck in our respective apartments with nothing to do, our viewing of the most recent season has been more swift. It was a shorter season to begin with, filmed in South Africa this winter to bridge the gap between the traditional summer mega-seasons shot in Spain. But also we’ve just been hungrier, I suspect, for the mind-flattening effects of the show, the way it dulls one’s internal understanding of dramatic stakes. What a decadent joy, to care so much about whether sorry Shaughna is going to be jilted by shifty Callum—to feel genuine suspense about something so inane. Love Island offers generous permission to relax the defensive crouch we’ve been in for years now, the constant tension that’s been even more pronounced in the last six or so weeks, and revel in the stupid stuff.
It’s also been a good communicative tool, my friend and texting each other as we watch each amiably petty development unfold. I’ve come to treasure this semiweekly-ish rite. It’s helped bring a new sense of routine and tradition and connection to a life knocked out of its regular orbit. And there’s such a vast supply of Love Island. Once we’re done with season six, we can go back and watch seasons one through three, probably feeling a little melancholy about the recent past (what a golden, easy world that was!) to go alongside the pleasingly familiar stupor.
Love Island is by no means a perfect show. Its biggest flaws lie in its reliance on a certain kind of gender essentialism, slotting boys and girls into rigid roles, ones most contestants always seem more than happy to perform. Though built to be an equal-opportunity validation and rejection machine, the show still seems to give slight advantages to the boys. Or, at least, it lets preexisting culture schemata preside over the happenings in the villa. But for a reality show that, from the outside, appears irredeemably sleazy, Love Island (the U.K. edition, anyway; I can’t speak for the other ones) actually has a decency to it, a disarming affability that seems totally, welcomely alien on the klieg-lit, typically blood-strewn stage of reality television.
No one gets shitfaced and breaks a table. There are no screaming matches, no horrible recriminations hurled across nightclub banquettes. I’m sure not everyone on the show has a squeaky past, or present for that matter. But little of the outside world infects the show. It really is just a bunch of pretty-ish dopes trying to couple up and make something work, even if only for the duration of their time in the villa. There’s a grace to the show’s genial, languid simplicity, one that brilliantly offsets the jagged, relentless anxiety and disarray of the moment we find ourselves in.
I’ll be retreating to the villa for a couple hours tonight. And then a few more on Saturday, or Sunday. And then a few more, and a few more, and so on and so on as this lost spring tumbles into the unknown. Maybe you’ll enjoy doing the same. If you watch Too Hot to Handle and find something about its format intriguing, but don’t like what the show does with its raw material, I hope you’ll remember that Love Island is out there, waiting for you. Near-nude in the glaring sun, ready to draw you in close to its tattooed bosom. You’d be a fool to turn it down.
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