Too Hot to Handle is Netflix's horniest show: "It’s bold, to make a 21st-century reality TV show with Catholic principles"

Observer

"Imagine if, every time you masturbated, you lost $3,000. Now imagine the incident was, just go with me here, filmed on a tropical island and then analyzed by a group of ten angry people," says Ralph Jones. "This is the cruel and surreal threat hanging over every horny contestant on Too Hot to Handle, the new Netflix reality experiment that offers $100,000 to whoever can lay off boning—and any other kind of sexual business, including kissing—for a month. As a premise, I’m here for it. It’s bold, to make a 21st-century reality TV show with Catholic principles: zero sex, plenty of guilt. Completely by chance, the conceit is also eerily prescient in the time of a global pandemic: stuck at home with little to do but stare at screens, the locked-down population will gladly get a vicarious tan by watching contestants sunbathe, and many of them will also know exactly how it feels to be denied sex right now. On Too Hot to Handle it’s the producers doing the c*ckblocking; in real life it’s the government and a virus."

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