Too Hot to Handle

I can’t say whether anyone comes out of this show a better person, as Lana is supposedly teaching them to be. But I can say it’s a fantastic reality-show mechanism for making me weirdly fond of these goobers. ... Too Hot to Handle is too silly and too messy — and too weirdly nice by the end — to not be appealing.

The episodes are short, snack-like and disgustingly bingeable. I did not feel good about gobbling up all eight episodes, nor could I stop myself doing it. It will, inevitably, be massive.

Those of you out there who relish the escapism of sleazy junk like this may appreciate it for its too-hot-for-network-TV moments, and possibly for its scintillating iguana content.

Most of the cast of Too Hot to Handle aren't built for anything deeper than a foot bath — and the prospect of $100k split 10 ways isn’t enough to keep many of them invested for long.

By the time you finally learn a contestant’s backstory in the second half of the show—that they come from a broken home, or they’ve been cheated on, or they’re a single mother—you’re already too steeped in toxicity and boredom to care. It’s unfortunate that despite the arsenal of weapons at the producers’ disposal (which include adding new contestants to test connections, tempting private suites, and watches that light up when contestants are allowed to kiss) the show never manages to be as scintillating or as meaningful as it claims to be.

The show’s half-hearted effort to mock dating show clichés doesn’t blend too well with its half-hearted purpose, to supposedly help the good-looking narcissists achieve personal growth and build deeper relationships. ... A fairly witless excursion, with a batch of characters who seem like they were created in a reality show writers’ room.

Too Hot is a thoroughly awful show—a social experiment with a flimsy premise that fails to either yield remarkable results or create interesting characters. But what its makers couldn’t have known during production is that it’s also weirdly relevant in the time of coronavirus.

The whole tone of Too Hot to Handle, especially, involves goofing on the participants in wry voiceover, leveraging everything we've come to know about such characters from "The Bachelor," "Temptation Island" and every other dating show spun out of those molds. ... While they might be easy on the eyes, to use a term as old as "hanky panky," what comes out of their mouths can be torture to the ears, and the show seems to dislike them every bit as much as the audience is supposed to.