Physical 100 Season 1 Review: Deceptively Brilliant Reality TV

There is an interlude in the fourth episode of Physical: 100, Netflix’s Korean-language fitness reality competition series in which the remaining 25 contestants take a break from the official challenges to see who can jump the highest. For a series that only has nine episodes, that might seem like a waste of time. This is not one of the top five physical challenges. Nobody gets eliminated unless they can jump as high as Iron Man, aka Olympic skeleton racer Yun Sung-bin, who jumps from a stationary position onto a stack of mats nearly as tall without stretching or breaking a sweat. All the winners deserve is the admiration of their competitors. But as the show moves past the introductory Torsi Hall (one bust for each contestant), one gets the impression that their competitors’ admiration for these athletes is worth far more than the 300 million won (about US$235,000) prize. .

It’s a serious, contagious joy Physical: 100 that sets it apart from much of the reality competitor television we get in the US The Great British Bake Off, but with fewer shirts and many more participants. It’s not easy doing a reality show with competitions that starts with 100 entrants — honestly, that’s just too many people to keep track of. There are farmers and fencers, Olympic champions and mountain rescuers. There’s a bunch of gym rats who make their living as YouTube influencers, and a bunch of ex-UDT reservists who are now YouTubers too. And yes, one of the contestants is actually a cheerleader.

The show does a good job of letting us appreciate the diversity of sporting backgrounds, even though everyone in the group seems to know or know each other from each other. “Everyone who trains in Korea is here,” says a contestant in the first episode of the show between the torsos. This may not be true, but I appreciate how intertwined the fitness community of celebrities can be, especially in a country where 50% of the population lives in the capital.

But most of us watching aren’t members of Seoul fitness clubs or Koreans, so it can be daunting to anticipate a subtitled series that starts with 100 participants. Unscripted TV relies on character arcs to keep audiences engaged and invested. Physical: 100 uses Voice-of-God narration to relay the challenge rules to on-screen contestants, but the series notably has no presenter to provide commentary or encourage discussion. In Single’s Inferno, Netflix’s other hit K-reality show, we’re getting couch hosts. They are viewer substitutes, on-screen friends we can watch and react with. In Physical: 100the competitors themselves fulfill this function.

When not competing directly, they admire, speculate and cheer on the other participants, as does the audience. “Won’t one of them die?” one contestant whispers to another as they anticipate a particularly muscular duel. “Biceps femoris torn,” comments someone else elsewhere in the series while admiring another contestant’s bulging thighs. “Such a gentleman!” “You are so great!” others shout during a head-to-head competition that also includes Choo Sung-hoon (aka Yoshihiro Akiyama, aka Sexyama), a 47-year-old Korean-Japanese MMA fighter who understandably everyone wants to be friends with. When Choo inevitably defeats his challenger, younger MMA fighter Shin Dong-guk, Shin is simply honored to have had the chance to face off against one of his idols. He leaves the show grinning.

As competition reality TV viewers, we love to see our favorites win and may feel some satisfaction when those we deem less worthy don’t make it to the end. That’s why we have the phrase “villain edit,” a reality TV term used to describe editing decisions made to make someone the antagonist of the show. In Physical: 100, there are no rogue edits; There are only cheerleader edits, and it works great to cheer us on for this group of Korean athletes and the handful of non-Korean participants (including American baseball player Dustin Nippert, who is 6ft 8, isn’t fluent in Korean, and just seems happy to be included). When rugby player Jang Seong-min is eliminated from the competition in episode 5, he takes time out in his exit interview to send a message of support to the remaining players, including those who literally just beat him: “First of all , Congratulations. I hope you complete the remaining missions without injury. I’ll cheer for you from afar.”

driving Physical: 100, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Like others who pay attention to Korean pop culture, I first heard about it when BTS member Jungkook saw them on a live stream while eating chicken, boosting the show’s global exposure. When I looked at the premise – 100 athletes compete in a series of five physical challenges to see who has the best “physique” – I was cautious. In America at least, that kind of TV competition could easily turn into a machismo mess.

But the athletes inside Physical: 100 Don’t enter cock-measuring competitions, even if they roll up their shorts to compare thigh size. Competitors are usually not interested in equating physical performance with social superiority. Even if they are asked to make declarations of dominance – e.g. B. “I felt like a predator looking at prey” – it doesn’t feel like their hearts are really in it. They see their own possible limitations – of mental will or physical strength – as the real potential antagonists lying in wait.

There is a shared joy and commitment to sportsmanship among athletes in Physical: 100 this keeps the series from sliding into the potential ugliness of the competition. In Squid Game – a thinly veiled metaphor for modern life under capitalism and a series that many western viewers have used as an ill-fitting comparison for this reality TV show – the fictional characters constantly clash with the artificial scarcity of the game and our world. Because this artificial scarcity of resources often also applies in our own world, it is a function of systemic inequality as the status quo. In Physical: 100there are clear, strong limitations on who can win the money, but there is a glorious infinity in the joy and belonging these athletes seem to find in fitness – this is a gathering of nerds, although we often don’t recognize fitness as such , which to be nerdy about.

It’s unexpectedly healthy, especially since the stakes are relatively low for a group of people who look like they’ll probably be fine if they don’t win the money. At the end there may only be one competitor left, but those competitors will still be cheering each other on – often at the official challenges and whenever they’re just hanging out in the canteen jumping onto a pile of mats.