‘Too Hot to Handle’ Narrator Desiree Burch Explains Why the Contestants Lose Money to Hook Up With Each Other

Too Hot to Handle is a hugely popular reality TV show now in its fourth season. Launched in 2020, the Netflix series follows contestants living in a house for four weeks. The catch? These attractive singles cannot hook up with one another. Despite having hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake, contestants constantly break this rule. Too Hot to Handle narrator Desiree Burch explains why she thinks so many cast members have a hard time keeping their hands off each other.

‘Too Hot to Handle’ contestants constantly lose money to hook up with each other

In Too Hot to Handle Seasons 1 and 2, the prize money started at $100,000. In seasons 3 and 4, it doubled to $200,000 per season.

At the beginning of each season, the show’s virtual assistant, Lana, informs the contestants of prohibited activities. Usually, they include kissing and sexual contact. Each infraction costs a specific amount of cash, to be deducted from the prize money.

No season has seen any contestant end up with the original amount. And by the end of Too Hot to Handle Season 3, the cast had lost all $200,000. Technically, those castmates were in debt because their infractions totaled much more than $200,000.

‘Too Hot to Handle’ narrator Desiree Burch speculates why cast members keep breaking the rules

Burch has witnessed plenty of contestants give up money for a quick hookup. In a 2022 interview with Jezebel, the Too Hot to Handle narrator shared what she believes is the reason behind this phenomenon.

“[Being desirable] has been their currency up to that point,” she explained. “I just think somewhere they know they have a finite amount of time — even extraordinarily hot people get old. And then, there’s new hot people that get more dates than them. So somewhere they know that ‘I didn’t always have this, which means I won’t always have this.’”

She added, “Like if I went to an island where everyone just thought that big Black women were the hottest thing in the universe, I’d be banging everything. Because it’s hard to turn down that validation, especially when it feels like it’s based on something that you didn’t merit. So if you’re hot, it’s just because you won the lottery. I would feel like, ‘S***, I better use this before somebody finds out and takes it away.’”

Desiree Burch has opened up about feeling undesirable

Burch is a standup comedian, and her show, Unf*ckable, addresses the issue of self-esteem and feeling undesirable by society’s standards.

“Growing up, I was always fat. We were the only Black family in my neighborhood,” the Too Hot to Handle narrator told The Guardian in 2019. “And all that was against the backdrop of Hollywood, where everyone just wants to be attractive and get some sort of Hollywood validation.”

Her show’s title is also a “reappropriation” of a word that has been used against people.

“If something’s been leveled against you in a way that is meant to cut you down or to hurt you, after a while, you go, ‘F*ck it, I’m going to take that kind of thing on,’” she told Jezebel. “There isn’t anybody who is unf*ckable, as anybody who was born into a woman’s body understands. There’s always someone. You could smell like a trash bag and be coming out of a gym, and there’s always someone who’s like, ‘Hey.’”

Burch added, “I came from a place of being Black, fat, a virgin, all of these things where I was just like, ‘I don’t know how to do it, and no one wants to do it with me.’ And I was super born-again, raised that way. You spend so much time worried about if you belong as a human being that you don’t think about what it is that you want. And I think the same is true for extraordinarily attractive people, especially at the age where everyone wants them, and they also want to belong.”

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