Physical 100 season 1 review: deceptively brilliant reality TV

There’s an interlude in the fourth episode of Physical: 100, Netflix’s Korean-language fitness reality competition series, when the remaining 25 contestants take a break from the official challenges to see who can jump the highest. It might appear like a waste, considering there are only nine episodes. This isn’t one of the five main physical challenges. One person will not be eliminated if they can’t jump as high and as far as Iron Man Yun Sung-bin (Olympic skeleton racer Yun Sungtib), who leaps off a stationary platform onto mats nearly as tall as him without having to stretch or break a sweat. Only the admiration and respect of fellow competitors will be earned by the winner. As the show moves beyond its initial hall of torsos, one for each contestant, it becomes clear that the prize is far more important to them than their 300 million-dollar (about $235,000), winnings.

There’s an earnest, contagious joy to Physical: 100 that sets it apart from much of reality competition TV we get in the U.S. It’s Great British Bake OffIt’s the same as before, only with far less shirts and more participants. It’s not easy to make a competition reality show that begins with 100 entrants — frankly, that is just too many people to keep track of. You have fencers and farmers, Olympic gold medalists, mountain rescuer rangers, and Olympic gold medalists. A gaggle of fitness gurus make their living as YouTube influencers. There are also a few ex-UDT reservists that have become YouTubers. One of these contestants happens to be a cheerleader.

Even though the members of the team seem to have a common athletic background, it is a great show that helps us see the beauty in diversity. This is One another. “Everyone who works out in Korea is here,” one contestant says in the show’s first episode, amongst the torsos. That can’t be true, but I appreciate the nod to how intertwined the famous-people fitness community can be, especially in a country where 50% of the population lives in the capital city.

However, most people who watch the series aren’t members of Seoul gyms or Korean fitness clubs, and it can be daunting to tune in when there are only 100 of them. Unscripted television relies on the characters of its contestants to keep their viewers interested and engaged. Physical: 100 uses voice-of-god narration to relay challenge rules to the competitors on screen, but the series notably doesn’t have a host to provide commentary or prompt discussion. You can read the entire series here. Single’s Inferno, Netflix’s other K-reality show hit, we get couch hosts. These are our audience friends, the ones we watch and respond to. They are the audience surrogate, on-screen friends we can watch and react with. Physical: 100This is the function that competitors serve.

Image courtesy of Netflix

Image courtesy of Netflix

They are often watching, commenting and cheering for the contestants even when they’re not competing. “Won’t one of them end up dead?” one contestant whispers to another as they anticipate a particularly muscular matchup. “The bicep femoris are ripped,” someone else comments at another point in the series’ run, as they admire another contestant’s bulging thighs. “Such a gentleman!” “You’re so awesome!” others call out during a head-to-head competition that includes Choo Sung-hoon (aka Yoshihiro Akiyama, aka Sexyama), a 47-year-old Korean Japanese MMA fighter who everyone understandably wants to be friends with. Shin, a younger MMA fighter, is just as happy to see Choo win than Shin Dong-guk. He leaves the show smiling.

As competition reality TV viewers, we like to see our favorites win, and perhaps feel a certain kind of satisfaction when those we judge as less worthy don’t make it to the end. It’s why we have the phrase “villain edit,” a reality TV term used to describe editing choices made to shape someone into the antagonist of the series. You can find it here. Physical: 100, there are no villain edits; there are only cheerleader edits, and it works brilliantly to get us rooting for this group of Korean athletes and the handful of non-Korean contestants (including American baseball player Dustin Nippert, who is 6-foot-8, doesn’t speak fluent Korean, and just seems happy to be included). In episode 5, when rugby player Jang Seong-min is knocked out of the competition, he takes time in his exit interview to send a message of support to the players who remain, including the ones who literally just beat him: “First of all, congratulations. You should be able to complete the remaining missions with no injuries. I’ll root for you from afar.”

In the future, Physical: 100, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Like others who pay attention to Korean pop culture, I first heard of it when BTS member Jungkook watched it on a livestream while eating chicken, boosting the show’s global presence. When I looked into the premise — 100 athletes compete in a series of five physical challenges to determine who has the best “physique” — I was wary. At least in America, such a TV contest could quickly degenerate into an endless stream of machismo.

The athletes, however, Physical: 100 don’t engage in any dick-measuring contests, even if they do roll up their shorts to compare thigh size. Most competitors do not seek to equate physical strength with social supremacy. Even when they are asked to come up with declarations of dominance — e.g., “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 might — as the real potential antagonists lying in wait.

There’s a shared joy and a commitment to sportsmanship among the athletes in Physical: 100This keeps the series safe from falling into the trap of being dominated by other competitors. You can find it here. Squid Game — a barely veiled metaphor for modern life under capitalism, and a series many Western viewers have used as an ill-fitting comparison for this reality TV show — the fictional characters are constantly coming up against the artificial scarcity of the game, and our world. Because artificial scarcity is often a consequence of status quo systemic inequality, it hits. It is in Physical: 100, there are clear, stark limitations around who can win the money, but there is a glorious infiniteness to the joy and belonging that these athletes seem to find in fitness — this is a gathering of nerds, though we don’t often recognize fitness as something one can be nerdy about.

It’s unexpectedly wholesome, especially because the stakes are relatively low for a bunch of people who seem like they will probably be fine if they don’t win the money. In the end, there can only be one competitor left standing, but these contestants are still cheering for one another — often in the official challenges, and always when they’re just hanging around the mess hall, jumping onto a pile of mats.