‘There’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product,” Apple founder Steve Jobs once said and, although he would have gone out in the first round of the Netflix endurance contest Physical: 100 – he gave up competitive swimming as a youth – he would have had to respect its artistry. The concept, a cross between Squid Game and Gladiators, is the sort of idea you would kick around before last orders, congratulating yourself on your brilliance then forgetting to text Netflix in the morning. But the execution – pulling together 100 of South Korea’s most aesthetically daunting humans, designing tests of athleticism that don’t favour any of them, and wrapping it all together with storytelling and production values straight out of a dystopian sci-fi thriller – is flawlessly Jobsian, even if there is not a turtleneck in sight.
In the show’s first proper challenge, the 100 face off in a series of one-on-one bouts, trying to grab a medicine ball in order to be the one holding on to it when a three-minute timer runs out. Contestants who did well during the brutal and gruelling qualifying round can pick their opponents, as well as choosing the arena – an obstacle-filled playground that favours more agile athletes, or a sandbag-lined paddling pool that rewards raw power. One of the show’s frontrunners, an Olympic gold medallist gymnast, doesn’t want to pick on anyone, so he asks the other 99 contestants who will step forward. Nobody wants to, so the gymnast chooses the weakest-looking contestant, only for it to emerge that the latter is a breakdancing contortionist who goes after the ball with a parkour-infused feline ferocity that is genuinely unsettling. No spoilers on who wins, but after the competition is over, they have a good-natured dance-off. The loser then has to smash a life-sized sculpture of their own torso with a hammer.
It all just works – brilliantly. Physical: 100 wears its Squid Game influences on its non-existent sleeves – a disembodied voice explains the challenges, the supervisors wear overalls and masks, and the legal disclaimers they have all signed must be bananas. It takes Squid Game’s viral appeal – the endless “How would I have done in that challenge?” chats, tweets and YouTube re-enactments – and turns it up to 11.
Every matchup provides endless opportunities for armchair quarterbacking. In the ball game, the grapplers can pin their opponents down for as long as they like, but at some point they have to sprint for the ball. The arm-wrestlers and strongmen have a near-insurmountable advantage, but only until they get tired. The balance between the athletes that Physical: 100 introduces, the different ways they find to tackle its challenges, and the debate to be had over how you would do it is the real genius of the show. Obviously, us non-superhumans would end up crushed by the competition in any test of physical capacity – the near-hour-long scene where they are all introduced is enough to make anyone swear off biscuits for a fortnight – but it is nice to imagine that, with just a couple of years of Batman-like ascetism, you, too, could find yourself hefting sandbags across a big wobbly bridge.
Another of the show’s joys is how charming the contestants are. Maybe you will root for model-turned-farmer Kim Kyung-jin, who built his physique hauling sacks of yams? Perhaps you will cheer on wrestler Jang Eun-Sil, who kicks off the ball-wrangling round by suplexing her opponent through a stack of tyres? Or maybe you will be as mesmerised as all the other contestants are by skeleton bobsleigh champ Yun Sung-bin, a man whose comic-book proportions are only slightly less incredible than his hair? It doesn’t really matter, because they’re all lovely: constantly buoying each other up, smirking their way through the world’s least-threatening trash talk and being all aw-shucks when someone compliments their lat muscles.
If the mark of a really good show is how badly you expect the inevitable American remake to ruin it, this is where Physical: 100 shines. There is surprisingly little posturing and very little braggadocio. The contestants may have spent decades carving themselves into action-figure shape, but they are very supportive of each other, starstruck when they meet their heroes and almost apologetic when they knock each other out of the competition. If you hated PE at school or worry that your local gym will be full of ’roid rage, this might be just the thing to nudge you into picking up a barbell for the first time. Because, in the end, Physical: 100 is nothing like Squid Game – and in an era of TV nastiness, this show about physical behemoths rugby-tackling each other in a sandpit is incredibly nice.
