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Episodes 1-4
Our favorite stress inducer returns, the latest in Netflix’s expanding Physical saga, Physical: Asia. Representatives from eight countries (not six, as I keep saying) gather to fiercely compete in the old games of sand and crate. In addition to a superstar like Manny Pacquiao and new favorites like Australia’s Eddie Williams and Japan’s Nonoka Ozaki, South Korea’s put up a dream team including season two’s winner Amotti and our forever captain, Jang Eun-sil.
Donovan and I discuss how the old rewards of the show filter through a somewhat tricky new lens, and balance anxieties of what’s to come with the excitement for breakout players and their respective cultures.
(Check out Part II here)
Oh, if ye wondering why we sound less than our usual confident, handsome selves, it’s because we’re both sick.
Runtime: [01:32:27]
Further Reading
Turkish-South Korean bonds blossom through culture, shared history
Manny Pacquiao renews criticism of homosexuality
Mongolian Wrestling (Bökh): Where Strength Meets Tradition
Inside Turkey’s ancient oil wrestling championship
Zehra Güneş (because I forgot to mention her)
Music Selection: “Wolf Totem,” by The Hu
With Eyes East 
My apologies for the Culinary Class Wars recommendation. I did end up enjoying the series as a whole, particularly the design of the semi-final quest which involved the semi-finalists having to repeatedly come up with different dishes for hours using a mountain of tofu.
I enjoyed the design of Quest 1 and Quest 2 for Physical: Asia. I’m not sure what the point of the hill was in the king of the hill challenge, but Quest 1 as a whole provided an interesting chance for all the teams to mix things up in the early rounds. The tie-breaker rules need tweaking ahead of time instead of making them up on the spot.
Shipwreck, OTOH, was excellent and devious in a good way. The two bottlenecks were the zip-line and the cart with latter being the real crux: it needed two people but if you always had two people at the cart and one on the zip-line, then that only leaves three people to feed the bottlenecks. But not having two always at the cart meant whoever was doing both the feeding and the cart would have to repeatedly climb the one ladder. And so managing that was crucial, and while strength obviously helped, there were roles for agility, stamina and speed. Nor did I feel the Aussies cheated: sure there were crates and bags on two sides of the set but there was no sense in which any team owned them until they moved them. If you could move crates fast enough to need more crates after exhausting your side of the storage area, then why should you not take the available crates?
I do think there’s at least a little progress on the sexism in P:A. If nothing else, they’ve gone from a ratio of 3:1 for men to women to 2:1 which is a step in the right direction.
My only real hesitation about the nationalism of this set up, is that it can feel like a Korean show rigging things to say: look, we Koreans are as buff/good/strong/whatever as the Westerners but the rest of Asia isn’t. (And clearly the casting has very little chance of being fair in perfectly natural ways. I’m sure every Turkish athlete has always dreamed of increasing their market profile in Korea.)
I look forward to your coverage of the rest of P:A.
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No apologies necessary. I would’ve liked to have watched it and understood the odd reference hallyu people were making about it around that time, but I think Physical: 100 is the only 100-contestant show I can do (and am so glad it’s only 48 this time).
I think the key, too, with the Australians on the Shipwrecked challenge is that the two crates didn’t make the difference in their victory — if I recall. They would’ve won anyway. Unfortunately, I have seen that discussion about the Australian team, and claims of bad sportsmanship generally, has monopolized the conversation about this season. And who knows, maybe Donovan and I will be hung up on it, too, when we record again. And yeah, it’s not like Korea can win without bellyaching, either. Pulling for Team Japan! (Haven’t seen the latest two episodes yet).
Hey, and thanks for sticking with me over the years. I really appreciate it, as well as your commentary.
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So I guess I won’t be recommending most Asian music survival shows for the past 10 years. Produce101 sort of set the model of “we’re going to have more contestants for longer than any other competitive music reality show. Take that, American Idol!” More is better, obviously.
I’m suspecting that some if not all the taunting and peacocking that some of the Australians are doing is prompted by the producers at least before the cast walks on set if not in the moment. This show is reality tv and not a sports broadcast or documentary.
I’m rooting for the Japanese team too, but I watch way more Japanese content than Korean these days. I’ve become a jdrama otaku. There is a musical time travel series on Netflix now call Extremely Inappropriate. The music is in no way near as good as that of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but it is a heartwarming look at changing values in Japan. Much more aligned with your interests these days, however, might be the live action version of Shiawase Kanako no Koroshiya Seikatsu (Kanako’s Life as an Assassin) in which an office lady quits her job and gets offered a job as a hitman, and it turns out that the years of abuse and harassment she experienced have made her preternaturally good at the new job. It’s a comedy! You can find it on unlicensed streaming sites by searching for “Shiawase Kanako no Koroshiya Seikatsu eng sub”
I’ll be going through the next 2 episodes of P:A in the next few days as well.
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Office lady hit man does sound good. There are a lot of Jdramas I’ve been meaning to watch, and it looks like HBO Max just got an influx of them.
And yeah, I watch MTV’s The Challenge for my job, and the drama feels so manufactured that I can never fully believe what I’m seeing, no matter how many times Korean reality programming replays it. Of course, I don’t want to assume that nothing is genuine, so I’ve resolved to just not worry so much about contestant behavior. I certainly don’t know what it’s like to be on camera with that much adrenaline pumping
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