Fame, food and pain collide in this series that combines insightful celebrity interviews with chilli’s capacity to cause entertaining physical distress.
Over the years, many programs have taken advantage of the spiritual value of a shared meal.
Watch any episode of MasterChef to see people waxing lyrical about the deeper meaning of food – the way it brings people together, represents culture and identity, conjures up happy memories of love and family, and the sweetest moments of life. You’ll frequently see cooking show contestants assert that a dish they’ve made is “me on a plate”, suggesting that food isn’t just what we eat, it’s who we are.
Which is why it’s so interesting when one show goes against the grain and highlights an aspect of food that isn’t so often discussed: its capacity to hurt you. And so here we have Hot Ones, the show that combines insightful celebrity interviews with the weaponisation of hot sauce to cause human beings entertaining physical distress.
You may already well be familiar with Hot Ones. If not, it’s time you got on board, given the show has been around for 10 years and has become such a phenomenon that last year First We Feast, the YouTube channel that produces the show, was sold for $US82.5 million. This is a testament to the public’s craving not just for food-themed programming, but also for watching other people suffer.
The premise of Hot Ones is simple: host Sean Evans sits down with a famous person and asks them questions about their work and career, while both interviewer and interviewee eat 10 chicken wings (meat-free alternatives provided for vegetarian subjects).
Each wing is garnished with a dollop of increasingly hot sauce – starting with a mild 1000-2000 Scoville rating, and ratcheting up, wing by wing, to over 2 million when the final sauce, the dreaded “Last Dab”, is applied.
Water and milk are available to soothe burning tongues, though there’s a limit to how soothed one can be, as the heat rises from a pleasant sriracha or buffalo sauce to bottles with skulls on the labels and names such as “Eye of the Scorpion” and “Da’Bomb Beyond Insanity”.
Evans, who has clearly spent his entire life building up a tolerance for brutally spicy food, retains a disturbing calm as he downs wing after wing while asking his questions. On the other side of the table, the nervous celebrity strives to keep their cool and, most of the time, doesn’t quite manage it as the heat in their mouth builds and builds, until eventually, body and mind go into meltdown.
As the saga continues, discussion topics veer from the life of a superstar and the artistic process to the unfortunate biological changes being experienced due to the inadvisable ingestion of dangerous substances. And though the former is always interesting, everyone knows what we’re here for: to see the effect that these lethal sauces have.
It might get monotonous if reactions never varied, but it’s compelling to see just how different people respond. Actor Florence Pugh takes a combative approach, fighting the sauce at every turn. Fellow actor Anna Kendrick, on the other hand, drifts away into another world, declaring that the hot wings are having the same effect on her as weed – but with added pain.
On the flipside, actor and comedian Will Forte retains astonishing composure throughout, calmly commenting on the different flavour profiles of the sauces while seemingly suffering no ill effects.
And then there’s talk show host Conan O’Brien, a consummate showman in any situation, who throughout his episode loudly proclaims his resistance to the heat even as he spirals into madness and his face gradually turns the same colour as his hair.
“Everyone knows what we’re here for: to see the effect that these lethal sauces have.”
Perhaps what we really learn is that extreme spice breaks down people’s inhibitions – if you want to reveal someone’s true nature, load them up on high-Scoville.
Naturally, Hot Ones has spawned an empire. There are spin-offs, like Hot Ones: The Game Show, and Hot Ones Versus, in which two celebs play Truth or Dare, but the “dares” are hot wings. There are also Hot Ones brand frozen wings and, of course, a whole range of sauces. So you can, if you like, play Hot Ones at home with your own loved ones. Though just how loved they are might be questioned once the Last Dab comes out.
Hot Ones is definitely not what you’d call an educational show, although there are valuable lessons to be learnt if you ever need to extract information from Tom Holland or Lady Gaga. Neither does it fall into the category of “food porn” – the meals consumed here are more cautionary tales than mouth-waterers, more Survivor than Maggie Beer’s Christmas Feast.
In the ecosystem of foodie entertainment, it’s an outlier: demonstrating just how fun it can be to see fame, food and pain collide. But more than anything, Hot Ones is, itself, like a beautifully prepared dish: the secret is always in the sauce.
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