Too Hot to Handle

Yes, at times laughs are coming at the contestant’s expense and some of the behavior featured on the show is downright absurd, but it’s all mighty entertaining and there’s a very effective blend of that absurdity and also some legitimate heart.

Season three delivers sufficient scandal, a shock shot at redemption, and even a surprise love story. But not everyone is destined for a happy ending this time. Since most of the action is driven by a handful of islanders, the others mostly sip on tropical cocktails and work on their tans.

Shows like this live or die based on their contestants, and this year’s crop of alarmingly extroverted attractive people are promising. ... Despite watching most of the hijinks in slack-jawed dismay, I was soon clicking on the next episode, and then the next.

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.

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.

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.

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. ... 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.