Critic Reviews

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.

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.

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.

The new season is set to be as outrageously prudish as ever; unlike Lana, I urge you to give in.

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.

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.

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.

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.