Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hot Ones: The Game Show’ On TruTV, Where Teams Eat Extremely Hot Wings And Try To Answer Questions

Ever gotten brave at your local watering hole and ordered the “atomic” wings, or maybe even the ones that are the “brain-melting” kind, just to say you did? Would you do it, then answer questions while everything’s burning, for a chance at some cash? That’s the idea behind Hot Ones: The Game Show. You’ve been warned…

HOT ONES: THE GAME SHOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A montage of contestants go into the “Pepperdome,” where host Sean Evans dares contestants to eat chicken wings cooked in increasingly hotter sauces. We see scenes of people tearing up, sweating profusely, blowing snot bubbles, vomiting, and doubled over in pain. The ultimate prize? $25,000!

The Gist: Hot Ones: The Game Show is taking First We Feast’s popular YouTube series Hot Ones, hosted by Evans, to a new level. Two teams of two friends spend three rounds answering fairly simple questions. There’s one complication: In each round they have to answer questions after eating a chicken wing made by resident wing cook Chef Willie with extremely hot sauce. We’re talking about sauces using peppers that are in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, on the Scoville Scale.

In the first two rounds, the audience chants “CLEAN THAT WING!” as each contestant finishes their wing, then, as their eyes and fingers are burning, their mouths are tingling and their stomachs are doing loop de loops, they’re asked to ring in on multiple choice questions. If they get it right they get the money. If they get it wrong, the other team gets the money. Of course, the hope is that one of the team members isn’t doubled over a bucket, like Brendan immediately was after eating the first wing in the game.

The third round has the teams taking one bite of the most scorching wing served yet and then trying to climb “Mount Scoville,” where Evans gives a bunch of descriptions of something and a team has to ring in and guess. If they guess right, they get the money at that level, but they also have to take another bite of the wing. If they guess wrong, the other team has a chance to steal. Whoever has the most money at the end of the round goes to the bonus round.

This is where it gets interesting: In the bonus round, the “Ring of Fire,” the team members have to down a shot of a sauce consisting of the three previous sauces, then one person tries to describe phrases that the other needs to guess. If they get five words in 60 seconds, the team gets $25,000 and “the antidote”: massive mugs filled with frosty milkshakes. If they don’t, they don’t even get the milkshakes (“milkshakes are for winners,” Evans says).

Our Take: Where the original Hot Ones interview series (which will air along with the game show version on truTV) seems relatively chill (pun intended), Hot Ones: The Game Show turns its BDE up to ten, maybe even twelve. There’s lights, there’s fire, and they have no problem showing the contestant teams baiting each other through their peppery tears. Surprisingly, though, the show is entertaining precisely because it just doesn’t give a shit.

Listen, if your first two sets of contestants — a pair from Staten Islanders named Nick and Vinny who call themselves “The Bub-up Team,” and Sam and Brendan, who call themselves “Blisterin’ Besties” — almost get into a fight, you’re setting a certain expectation for this show. I called this show “The Douches’ Wild” to my wife, and it seems to aptly describe the show, even when the contestant teams aren’t guys trying to act overly tough.

Why? Because if you’re willing to subject yourself to the pain of eating blistering hot wings then downing a shot glass of hot sauce that has a Scoville score in the millions for a relatively paltry $25,000, then you have a macho streak in you that also likely propels you to tailgate people on the highway, pour cinnamon directly down your throat and maybe even gnaw on a Tide Pod for fun. In other words, you have no shame or sense of your personal safety.

So, why should I as a viewer be anything but entertained as your eyes close after you accidentally rub them with your pepper-stained fingers? Why should I be anything but gleeful when I see you throw up either during or after the contest? And why should I, as someone who ate his share of “fire eater” wings, not chuckle with knowing glee about what’s going to happen when the wings and sauce you just ate exits your body? It may be gross to watch, it may have too much testosterone running through it, but dammit, I liked watching these dopes suffer. What does that say about me?

Sex and Skin: The thought of this is too painful to contemplate.

Parting Shot: We think the team that wins the bonus round isn’t thinking of the money as much as those milkshakes, which we gathered by watching the end of the first episode. But the thought of dairy and sugar sharing stomach space with those wings and sauces makes us nauseous.

Sleeper Star: Chef Willie may or may not be a real chef, but he really knows how to hype a hot sauce. “This first sauce attacks your head and makes your brain cry!”

Most Pilot-y Line: Why rate the sauces on a “Hot Ones Scale” of 1-10 if you also mention the Scoville score?

Our Call: STREAM IT, especially if you like seeing bros (and women who are bro-adjacent) get a little comeuppance and a lot of pain. Hot Ones: The Game Show might make you swear off those “atomic” wings the next time you go to your favorite sports bar.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Hot Ones: The Game Show On TruTV.com