Dead Hot is, without a doubt, the most batshit show I’ve ever watched. If, after reading this, you decide to watch it, I would be willing to bet a tiny horse (more on this later) that it will also be the most batshit show you have ever watched.
It starts off tame. In present-day Liverpool, twentysomethings Elliot (Bilal Hasna, so good in Extraordinary) and Jess (the Bafta-winning Vivian Oparah) are best friends, united by a bond of grief at losing Peter, Elliot’s first and only love and Jess’ twin brother.
In the opening scene, Elliot discovers Peter’s apartment is empty, the only trace of him a severed finger in a pool of blood. Five years on, still trying to recover from the trauma, the pair have spiralled into hedonism to numb the grief, while clinging on to the hope that they will one day find out what happened to him.
When Elliot meets handsome stranger Will (newcomer Marcus Hodson) on another drunken night out, he’s convinced it’s love at first sight, and that he might finally be able to move on from the heartbreak of losing Peter. But Jess has just received a match to a “close relative” on a DNA pairing app (if you think that’s a little far-fetched, buckle up), which she thinks must be Peter trying to get in touch with her.
Meanwhile, a side-plot introduces Elliot’s wealthy grandmother, who pays his rent in exchange for Elliot pretending he’s not gay, and the perpetually irascible Aunt Bonnie, who is planning her wedding to her new online boyfriend, an underwear model who is inexplicably called McCuffley Hamburgerson. Inevitably, these two storylines slowly start to converge, and when they do, it’s chaos.
It’s only at this point that the show really begins to lose its handle on reality. Until about episode three, it is benignly silly – the oddballs and campy one-liners are pleasantly quirky, and the premise is genuinely pretty gripping. Think Edgar Wright meets It’s A Sin (the executive producer Nicola Shindler actually worked on both shows).
But it quickly descends into last days of Rome/Pretty Little Liars season seven levels of convoluted chaos. One scene sees Elliot running through the fields of rural Ireland in a furry dolphin costume (yes, that kind of furry) in search of Jess, who is being targeted by her mafia-adjacent long-lost family, a child believed to be the second coming of Christ referred to as “toddler Jesus”, and a tiny horse called Chrysanthemum. To be honest, my notes on the last half of the show mainly consist of “what the f***,” “am I hallucinating the tiny horse in every scene?”, “pink horse dildos – is this really a kink?” and “so this whole thing actually about furries?”.
But the odd thing is, it’s not necessarily bad. It is slapstick verging on pantomime at points, and the Edgar Wright inspiration does occasionally teeter into ham-fisted facsimile. But the humour is razor sharp, both Oparah and Hasna are predictably excellent (find me two more vibrantly expressive faces in contemporary television), and the denouement is weirdly satisfying. It is just unclear whether the crescendoing horror-thriller element is supposed to be taken seriously while everything else is so utterly ridiculous.
It’s likely to be a bit of a Marmite one. At best, you’ll emerge asking yourself “what the hell did I just watch?”, at worst, “why the hell did I just watch that?”. But, if you’ve been considering dabbling in hallucinogenic drugs but the cost-of-living crisis is hitting too hard, this show might make for a cheap alternative.
