Too Hot to Handle proves there’s no escape from sex island – for any of us

The Netflix show, with its pornish Malibu aesthetic, pretends to be about ‘not having sex’. Of course it isn’t, says Ed Cumming, but it sure as hell ain’t sexy

About as erotic as ‘The World at War’: Three cast members from Netflix’s ‘Too Hot to Handle’ (Netflix)

If you haven’t yet managed to catch up with Too Hot to Handle, Netflix’s attempt at the burgeoning sex-island genre, now in its second series, the “idea” is that the usual assortment of horny young people, all prominently muscled and hairless from below the eyebrows, are bunged into a luxury resort under false pretences.

For this series, they think they are there for a new dating show called “Parties in Paradise”. Believing they are meant to get off with each other, they give diary-room type interviews in which they flaunt their promiscuity. “I’m like a set of open legs,” says one contestant, Emily from London. They set about merrily bumping and grinding before the twist is sprung: they are actually there to not get off with each other. Any inappropriate contact means money being taken away from the $100,000 prize fund. “The horniest people on earth are about to go from celebration to celibacy,” says the voiceover.

After the big reveal, the Alexa-type speaker who watches over them says: “The purpose of this retreat is to help you gain deeper and more emotional connections.” She’s mocking them, but she’s also mocking us, sat at home, watching with no idea why. “That’s not what we signed up for,” says one of the contestants. “I signed up for d***,” says another. We all did – or we thought we did.

Because, when you look at it, Too Hot to Handle was inevitable. In theory, the “concept” was invented by producers who were apparently inspired by the Seinfeld episode where the main characters try to go without masturbation. In truth, though, it was baked into the earliest reality TV shows. It was lying there from the start, waiting to be uncovered. Originally, these programmes were about uprooting normal people and seeing how they behaved in the fishbowl of the popular gaze. When they flirted or snogged or got off with each other, it was thrilling because you were witnessing something real that happened to be filmed. Decades on, after thousands of hours and hundreds of iterations, it’s clear that any format which gives licence to the basest human motivations must eventually end in either a sex island or a fight to the death. The regulators are still a bit shy on mortal combat, so here we are, slumped in front of yet another sex island.

And obviously, the rules don’t make much difference to their actions. One of the contestants, Nathan, is literally a stripper, but they all set about their sexy work with professional detachment. They bite each other’s bums and lick each other’s faces and snog without the faintest glimmer of frisson. Too Hot to Handle is about as erotic as The World at War.

Partly the Americans are to blame. Eventually these programmes will come full circle and everyone will be dressed in chunky knitwear in a cold cabin in Iceland, but not yet. The aesthetic still comes freshly waxed from Miami Beach and Malibu, a pornish look in which no limb is untoned and no cavity unfilled. Even the night looks studio lit. However much these PE bores try to convince us otherwise, there’s nothing sexy about going to the gym. Over the course of a few episodes, Too Hot to Handle dismantles the whole concept of sexiness before our eyes. It’s an end stage of reality TV in which the format is explicitly eating itself: the sexy people think they are having sex but are told not to have sex but in fact end up having sex but it’s not sexy.

Between all the empty declarations of lust and uncovered flesh, it’s hard to tell who the joke is on. The voiceover is knowing, the contestants are knowing, the sexiness all a hollow performance. Even before coronavirus, there was something amusing about the idea of a libido so irrepressible that even a cash incentive couldn’t keep it zipped up for a few weeks. Post-pandemic, it’s laughable. Far from being too hot, the programme is resolutely lukewarm, and that’s precisely why I love it. Beneath all the superficial sluttishness there is a charming moral: even you, you slob, eating Deliveroo in bed in a baggy jumper, your loins only warm because of the laptop battery, even you are sexier than the sexiest people in the world on sex island. Too Hot to Handle isn’t much of a reality show, but it’s perfect comfort TV.