Physical: 100 Season 2 - Underground (2024)

Entertaining watch, but dropped in quality compared to the first season

I became enthralled with Physical 100 ever since I watched it the first time and I even introduced my boyfriend to it lol.
I was really looking forward to the second season, but I must admit I was left disappointed.

Why?

1. Episodes became longer but with fillers of "ooh" and "aah" every thirty seconds.

2. The game were unimaginative. Some were rehashed from season 1, while others mostly focused on two things - sand and bags. And carrying them. While the maze and the minecart were "different" quests - they felt the same. Both had the same general idea. The final game consisted of three games - one of which was a consolation quest for losers in game one and the second one was - yep, you guessed it - related to bags and coal this time. Episode 8 was particularly hard to get through - watching them carry a metal cask full of sand for one hour and knowing who will lose before they even step foot on the game field wasn't really what I expected if you compare it to Season 1 and the mythological games they did, which were far more imaginative and allowed players to prove prowess in their respective fields.

3. Women will never, in any way, shape or form, have a chance in this format. While I understand they knew that when they applied, it's still not very pleasant to watch men treat champions and Olympic medalists as burdens and avoid them for group quests.

4. In the first season, we got a glimpse of contestants between quests. While they were lounging, we heard their talks, they did small contests, bonded. This time around, that was cut and the "reality" part of this reality TV show was really forced.

I expected more from a show that garnered so much hype (and funds). It was an entertaining watch, but left much to be desired.

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Why I (Probably) Won't Watch Season 3

I was very disappointed with this season - The same issues from season 1 are in this one, possibly even worse than before.

Physical 100 claims to go beyond race, age, and gender. But there’s little to no chance a woman can win.
Why? Because the producers only recruit a handful of women for the show compared to the outstanding majority being men. Also, almost all challenges are exclusively reliant on upper body strength, or at least heavily favor it.

This also makes winning impossible for anyone who doesn't have most of their strength in their upper body, regardless of gender. Only a few types of athletes and physical professionals have a shot at victory. It makes the show not only biased but also just plain boring and predictable.

Another major flaw is that the winner is heavily determined by luck - Even one of the participants admitted it in the final episode! The contestants’ fates of moving on to the next round rely on the order of challenges. Many challenges aren't even determined by sheer strength but by your team. A strong person is easily eliminated from things out of their control: leader strategy, who chooses them for their team, opponents stealing, etc.

Finally, revisiting the "beyond race" statement - I get that Physical 100 (so far) is mainly for Korean physical professionals, but claiming that this is a show that goes beyond race is laughable. This season had 3 out of 100 people who aren't full Korean. I just wish they wouldn't lie.

A lot of the show's issues could be solved with JUST THIS: relevant body strength. It's much more impressive to see a petite gal upholding 40% of her body weight instead of a muscular guy picking up a bit more than another muscular guy. Instead of giving the same-weighted object for every person to push, make it weigh proportional to their body mass. This would show participants' true strength. Team challenges would also make more sense as just bonus rounds for rewards or slight advantages.

The final aspect to fix would be no immediate eliminations. I think it'd be much more engaging to have challenges setup as a sort of leaderboard to see individual rankings for each challenge and overall. This would solve the whole "luck" problem.

This was a long rant, but to wrap things up, it seems like Physical 100 may have versions for other countries in the future. I'm hoping that they make major improvements for any and all new seasons. If that does happen, I'll definitely watch them; this show's concept is really interesting compared to exaggerated or scripted types of physical challenge shows.

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