This YouTube based interview show is something I didn’t find on my own: I needed my more online-culture savvy child to introduce me to it (and my spouse’s enthusiasm for the sow to latch me on to it.)
I consume very little born-digital culture despite the fact that I’m a fairly online person. A significant part of that reluctance is that I simply think it’s hard to sort the few things I’d really like from the innumerable things I would hate. I can’t stand the vast majority of notable TikTok performers and I’ve mostly felt the same way about major YouTube performers, streamers, etc.
But I do like (and recommend) Hot Ones because it offers something that mainstream talk shows featuring celebrity interviews don’t have, which is a deeper and better style of interview between the host Sean Evans and his various celebrity guests. You’d think the show would be more about its central gimmick, which is that the guests (and Evans) eat progressively more spicy chicken wings as the interview progresses, with many of the celebrities showing more and more distress near the end. Sure, occasionally that’s the main hook, usually when the guest has an unusual freakout or reaction even before they get to the really hot sauces.
Mostly, however, the appeal is Evans’ interview questions, which show a lot of respect for the careers of his guests—he and his staff do some great research and ask interesting, complicated questions that often catch the guests off-guard and force them to really think a bit, but never in a hostile way. The show incidentally reveals how uninteresting many of these potentially interesting people are forced to be when they’re on the conventional talk shows, doing the usual press tours, promoting their product, how rehearsed it all is. Every once in a while, Hot Ones gives you a vague sense that someone who is blandly appealing in their conventional promotional work might be a considerably less pleasant individual in real life (I thought Will Ferrell, for example, came off as vaguely sour and sullen) but mostly the various performers and notables who appear on the show end up seeming wonderfully human.
I’m focusing on Hot Ones today because my family told me about some episodes which I haven’t watched featuring Lizzo and Gordon Ramsay and the one major complaint I have about the show apparently figures significantly in both episodes. I’m annoyed enough about this issue that it almost spoils the show for me every time it bugs me.
What’s the problem? It’s simple enough: it’s a hot sauce called Da Bomb. While the show actually features a rotating line-up of sauces, this one is invariably used. Typically it’s the penultimate sauce. And typically, it absolutely destroys the celebrity guests, even those who are accustomed to hot sauces and spices, rendering many of them literally speechless.
The last sauce is often technically hotter, but many of the guests who manage to stagger on after Da Bomb often find the last one much less painful. I like hot sauces and I have high tolerance for hot spices. So I decided to order Da Bomb to see what was going on. And I have to say, like a lot of the celebrity chef guests on the show (including Ramsay), after tasting it, Da Bomb is just bullshit. It’s a terrible sauce that is intended to cause pain. It’s got no flavor to speak of—just a brief millisecond of chipotle flavor before it completely annihilates everything in your mouth and nose. You can be up there in the millions of Scoville units and still have flavor. I’ve had great hot sauces that are hotter than Da Bomb, it’s not about the heat as such.
So here’s this show where they go to the trouble of crafting interesting questions and creating a good conversation that is still going to put pressure on the guests even with really hot sauces that have some flavor to them, but they somehow feel obliged to sneak in a nasty hazing ritual near the end just for the supposed hilarity of watching famous people flip out. It’s not far off telling people that the last chicken wing they ate is really from a cat or something like that. It really ruins the whole thing for me much of the time, and I get the feeling that it leaves more than a few of the guests feeling some ill-will too. I’d watch with a much more serene happiness if they’d just change this one small but crucial component of the show going forward.
"colorful carolina reaper pepper spectrum" by woodleywonderworks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.