When I was younger, Too Hot to Handle, if it existed, would have been a programme committed to household safety, a show in which naifs from across Ireland would be gathered up and shown the latest electrical appliances and warned about the ways in which they might harm themselves.
People were always touching hot things in the 1970s. We couldn’t stop ourselves. We’d zip around in those onesies with pleather bootees attached, furiously pedalling plastic pedal cars, stopping only to touch temptingly hot pots on the boil. I guess it constituted a hobby.
Of course it’s possible that in classic white-middle-class-columnist style, I’m assuming that my own experiences are universal and that my obsession with touching hot things in the 1970s wasn’t just because I was a toddler. But who’s to say? We have no footage of the 1970s. In the 1980s or 1990s, on the other hand, a show called Too Hot to Handel would have been a boundary-pushing Channel 4 arts documentary about an orchestra committed to playing Messiah on the edge of an active volcano. It was a different time.
But now it’s the far future of 2022, the planet has a few decades of life left on it, and I am the Irish Times Hunk Correspondent – HC for short. These days Too Hot to Handle is a Netflix show in which hunks are collected and then released on a sun-kissed island where their sexual behaviour is limited and controlled by a robotic white cone with a lady’s voice.
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In fairness, if you had asked me in the 1990s what the future would look like, this would have been one of my guesses. I would have assumed it was the fate of the last humans, a set-up engineered by a mad computer or Elon Musk pretending to be a computer, not a reality-television show. Yes, I predicted Elon Musk and mad computers, but I failed to predict reality television. I really didn’t think there’d be a scenario in which large groups of people would turn on their televisions to watch hunks not having sex.
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The new series begins with a cunning ruse in which the sex-crazed, swimwear-clad inhabitants of the Too Hot to Handle archipelago are led to believe they’ve been recruited for a new programme called Wild Love hosted by the much-dimpled, elderly child star and Saved by the Bell alum Mario Lopez. The concept behind Wild Love is unclear, but the hunks are sure that it involves small pants and sexually unhinged behaviour. That said, I imagine they would feel the same if the show was named The News or Blankety Blank.
In reality they have been lured here to generate sexual frisson, like salmon in the Shannon, before being informed they cannot have sex for a month or they will lose a $200,000 prize. That’s well over $1 million in hunk bucks, given that they only need spray tan, protein shakes and swimwear to survive. But this revelation startles the hunks. They are not like singletons in times of yore, for whom the thought “You will not have sex for a month” would have been heard more optimistically as “There’s a chance you might have sex in a month.”
It is unclear if Mario Lopez is in on the programmemakers’ ruse or not. He is an ageing hunk whose best days of hunking may be behind him. It feels cruel to get him all amped up about hosting a new reality show only for him to discover, at the end of the first episode, that his job has been automated and that he’s to be replaced by a talking piece of white conical plastic. He’s a human metaphor for middle America so he is.
Before this big reveal we meet the contestants in the traditional style. They strut out wearing swimming trunks to drink champagne by the sea. This is interspersed with footage of each hunk posing while telling us about the hunky lives they lead. “I’m a model, an artist, a yogi ... There’s no box you can put me in,” a hunk named Nick says before realising the set he’s actually sitting in is a sort of illuminated box. “Except this one,” he adds, for accuracy’s sake.
Jawahir tells us that she likes “bad boys”: Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Just William, that sort of thing (I presume). A clever she-hunk named Dominique does equations with a marker on a sheet of glass. “I’m the sexiest nerd you’re ever going to meet,” she says, clearly unaware of Bunsen from the Muppets.
Nigel, a sentient triangle of muscle, is a new kind of hunk: an American called “Nigel”. He’s probably the only one. Struck by this innovation in hunking nomenclature, many of the female hunks immediately begin making plans for Nigel. Sexy plans. This is fine with him. “I think about sex every five seconds,” he confesses before saying, a little sadly, “It might be an illness.”
I think my favourite contestant, however, is a hunkette named Brittan. When Creed, an Australian hunk and Oedipal nightmare (no one should describe themselves as a “momma’s boy”) struts out to meet the others, Brittan says, in her English accent: “I hear an accent.” This allowed me to go, with perhaps more feeling than warranted, “Classic Brittan”.
And this is the main reason I like her. Her presence allows me to say things that feel strangely familiar in my mouth, things like “What is Brittan up to now?” or “Look at the state of Brittan” or “As the sun sets on a troubled Brittan, the unspoken problem is clearly the loss of empire.”
Placing a bunch of attractive people at a seaside idyll where their sexual instincts are challenged and aroused is also at the core of the second series of The White Lotus. The first season of writer-director Mike White’s brilliant melodrama was set in Hawaii and explored the power dynamics between rich American tourists and the poorer people who serve them.
The second season (Monday, Sky Atlantic, and streaming on Now) is set in Sicily with only one character carrying over (Tanya, played by the brilliant Jennifer Coolidge), and it’s all about sex and desire and the existential angst privileged people feel when all their material needs are met and they still feel empty inside.
Like the first season, it begins with a flash forward to an unknown corpse, but for the most part it’s a carefully observed sex comedy of manners rather than a thriller. Until the last episode, that is, when the tension ramps up and characters are swindled, betrayed and, in some instances, drowned.
It’s deliciously, nerve-janglingly entertaining. One of White’s innovations is that he upends American drama’s traditional love for moral reckonings. In the finales, the ultraprivileged characters (mostly) survive unscathed and untroubled. There is no natural justice in White’s universe, just structural injustice and people getting on with things oblivious to the plight of others. And sporadically, when the tension gets too much, the camera just turns towards the broiling sea like in Too Hot to Handle.
