Too Hot To Handle’s Hot Girl Summer
See also: summer of love, white boy summer, summer of 69 (literally)
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I live in Sydney, so I will unfortunately not be touching anyone this weekend. Luckily, though, I have the pleasure of watching other people also not touch anyone in Too Hot To Handle, with a second season that is somehow even hotter, even hornier, and even more salacious. Let’s ride, baybee.
Now streaming
Watch trailer
Too Hot To Handle S2
As Camus said: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” This is a quote that I have very much taken to heart, except by “within me” I mean “on Netflix” and by “summer” I mean hot girl summer. By “summer” I mean “of love”. By summer I mean the “white boy” variety (or at least its initial promise). By summer I mean “of 69” (quite literally).
By “summer” I probably do not mean Midsommar, although what I do mean — which is the tropical club paradiso of Too Hot To Handle — shares one element in common with Ari Aster’s cottagecore nightmare and that element is a group of people gathering in a segregated area with the express purpose of fornicating. Unlike Midsommar, however, these people do not actually get to fornicate.
If you think what I am saying is that the only thing keeping me warm throughout this tedious and interminable winter is the sheer schadenfreude of watching hot people literally suffering through physical pain in their efforts to avoid getting down and dirty with other hot people, you would be absolutely correct; that is exactly what I am saying. It’s also the cornerstone to why Too Hot To Handle is — as they say — binge-worthy viewing: the level of almost-too-much debauchery, the sheer will-they-won’t-they suspense dialed up to astronomical (and astronomically horny) levels, the fast and furious editing, the delightful cruelty of watching the reality show equivalent of a chastity belt! But I digress.
The premise of Too Hot To Handle, by now, is well-known: a cadre of beautiful contestants gather on an island getaway where any and all sexual contact will cost them a chunk of their $100,000 prize money. There are Bachelor-esque dates, there are raunchy exercises, there are lots of slo-mo shots of extremely oiled-up skin on extremely oiled-up skin. And of course, all of this occurs under the watchful surveillance of Amazon-Alexa-slash-anti-sex-security-guard Lana, who I’m pretty sure Foucault wrote about or something. It’s Lana’s panopticon, we’re just living in it.
A new season brings us a new array of people who describe themselves as maneaters, firecrackers, and “a set of open legs” (this is also what my Tinder bio says BTW, please DM me if you are interested), all of whom unfortunately think that they are participating on a made-up show called ‘Parties in Paradise’. What they want is Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club but sadly what they get is no sex and a digital overlord who is watching them at all times. Among the unfortunate: New Zealand’s answer to Elle Woods AKA Larissa, resident Frenchman Marvin (that’s mahr-VAN to those of you who have now learnt how to correctly pronounce lu-PAN), bottle rocket Melinda, and many other himbos and bombshells.
One thing to note about the show this time round: unlike its debut season, the contestants now know what Too Hot To Handle is, and even after the ‘Parties in Paradise’ ruse is up, they are simply unafraid to flout the rules openly and egregiously. The characters are bigger, the stakes are higher, and their prize pool is rapidly diminishing. There’s also...ostensibly...a plot around finding ~ deeper emotional connections ~, but let’s not kid ourselves: we all know the real reason we’re watching. After a year spent not touching a single person, there’s nothing more relatable than watching the hottest people in the world stoop to our level too.
The first episodes of Too Hot To Handle are now streaming.
Watch these too:
Two other ~ twisty ~ reality shows:
The Circle, which is like Big Brother if Big Brother took place during lockdown and everyone was confined to their rooms and couldn’t meet each other and could only talk by dictating text to a digital interface called The Circle and also could lie about their identities.
Love is Blind, a dating show where — as the name implies — participants date and get engaged without ever seeing each other first. Also it is hosted by Nick Lachey, who is famously invented marriage on his first reality show.
Two spinoffs:
Too Hot To Handle: Brazil and Too Hot To Handle: Latino, because, really, what is hotter to handle than people speaking in other languages????
And one trailer:
Sexy Beasts, a show which extends the Masked Singer industrial complex into its final frontier: dating.
I can’t stop thinking about:
Presented without context: this Marriage Story edit.
This tweet, which an unfortunate number of people have sent me…I get it, not everything is camp, but have you considered that saying something is camp when it’s not camp is...camp? Thank you for coming to my TED talk. (Also note that I haven’t used the word camp in the past three newsletters; this is called growth).
French director Claire Denis’ Instagram account, which has the two hallmarks of any hot Instagram account, AKA a BTS photo of Robert Pattinson and a two-digit following count. Claire Denis is the titular hot girl of hot girl summer.
On Becoming a God in Central Florida, which everyone must watch, now that it is streaming in Australia and New Zealand. This one is for all the Kirsten Dunst girlies. This one is for every zoomer who uncomfortably and incorrectly romanticises the 90s. This one is for every person whose family friend tried to sell them multi-level marketing scheme products to the point where they kept showing at their house at creepy hours even after they had been told that no-one wanted to buy $950 worth of fibre supplements!!!!!!!!!!
And apropos of nothing, a video of Blake Lively saying “it’s all good, just another Tuesday”:
Yes I know it’s a Friday but time means nothing and also A Simple Favor is now streaming.