- New Netflix series are still being added to the service, despite the coronavirus pandemic that’s shut down production on a large number of Netflix projects.
- The streamer has been crushing it lately on the reality show front, and a new such series is coming to the service later this month: Too Hot to Handle, along the lines of its past hits like Love is Blind.
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In the weeks before we were all stuck at home and too scared to go anywhere because of a killer virus (which sounds more like a bad movie plot than the scary world we’ve actually been living in for the past month), Netflix hadn’t yet hooked millions of viewers on the flamboyant, dirty South, too-crazy-to-be-true antics of an insane tiger breeder. No, back in those halcyon days we were still bingeing guilty-pleasure reality shows on the king of all streamers — series like The Circle and then, before the pandemic hit, Love is Blind.
Netflix has been crushing it on the reality show front lately, never mind that it started off its original content efforts by striding down the prestige road a la HBO with shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. It really is a testament to how adept Netflix has gotten over the years, that it’s able to conjure durable brands on its own, be they a show like Stranger Things or Love is Blind — the latter being built around an experiment about whether a group of strangers can be sent off to live in pods and “meet” each other sight-unseen to see whether or not attraction forms, or whether the love at first sight thing actually depends upon the, you know, sight. It was one of the most popular series on the streamer for weeks following its premiere on the streamer back in mid-February — and if you were a fan of it or The Circle (a similarly voyeuristic look at the interactions between a group of competitors in a quasi-social experiment), you might be happy to know that a new Netflix series right in this same vein is just around the corner. It’s called Too Hot to Handle, and it’s scheduled to debut on Netflix on April 17.
What you need to know: The premise is pretty straightforward. A bunch of good-looking people are going to get sent off to an island together to meet and have a good time. The prize is $100,000, and the way you obtain it is … by avoiding hanky-panky. These are going to be commitment-phobes, according to Netflix, who are pretty accustomed to flings, but there is to be nothing like that of any kind. Not even any kissing, let alone anything beyond that.
What the press material for the series makes it sound like is that this may end up being a bit subversive again, along the lines of Love is Blind. I suspect the ulterior experiment here will be more than simply presenting you with a borderline trashy, guilty-pleasure binge — it will also be about seeing whether some of these people dig each other enough to want to hook up anyway and say prize money be damned. But we’ll see.
I’m probably going to watch. Oh god, I hope not.
