Warning: spoilers ahead for Too Hot To Handle on Netflix.
It costs to be hot and horny. Thousands of dollars, to be exact, on Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle.
The streamer’s latest reality dating series offers up a familiar premise, a bunch of super-hot singles thrown into a house together to find love, but with an unconventional twist: to win the $100,000 USD grand prize, they’d have to give up sex. Each time someone broke the no-hanky-panky rules — enforced by a cone-shaped AI named Lana — the grand prize pot dwindled.
Viki Kolar and Jonno Richards, the executive producers of Too Hot to Handle, spoke to The Wrap to explain how they came up with the hefty price tags starting at $3,000 USD.
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“There were these sort of long discussions to work out what was the right amount to be a penalty when they got it, but people could still work with that,” Richards said.
A kiss cost $3,000 USD, oral sex costs cost $6,000 USD (ahem, Harry Jowsey and Francesca Farago) and sexual intercourse cost $20,000 USD (Harry and Francesca again.) We’re still not quite sure why Rhonda Paul and Sharron Townsend were handed a $16,000 USD fine, though. What DID those two do in their romantic alone time in the private suite?
Kolar said that while coming up with the price tag for full-blown intercourse was easy, pricing those “middle-ground things,” including oral sex and kisses (and likely whatever Paul and Townsend did), was harder.
“We didn't want to put money at the forefront of it, because actually the social experiment side was strongest to us,” Kolar told Refinery29.
Their plan worked: money didn’t seem to stop some of the contestants from getting it on without waiting for a break from the rules every now and then via a literal green light from Lana, who determined when it was okay to move to first base and beyond. Good thing this is just a show and not law or a lot of y’all would be broke and Francesca might not have any of her Fashion Nova money from Instagram.