What Is With... our obsession with Single’s Inferno, the tamest dating show on earth?

SINGAPORE – Writing a letter of recommendation for the hit Netflix reality dating show Single’s Inferno is a bit of an uphill battle.

So, there is this group of South Korean strangers, who are all sorts of surgically hot. They are stranded on a sweltering island, except it is more a case of glamping since they eat canned tuna for all of two days before it is suddenly army stew and iced coffee.

For nine days, they fight and flirt to win trips to “Paradise”, which is really just a soullessly upscale hotel suite where prospective couples can finally reveal their jobs and ages to each other, and eat bizarrely rubbery-looking “Western food”.

On the 10th day, they choose the person they want to leave the putatively hellish, but actually really beautiful “Inferno” island with, to “go eat something delicious” – which is a euphemism for dating in the real world. Luckless singles who do not get a match are left sitting on crates at the beach, squinting glumly into the middle distance.

It is quite the steamy set-up for the biggest gotcha: The South Korean show is more chaste than a Channel 8 drama.

In place of the genre’s usual explosive confrontations and scandalous trysts, the polished contestants of Single’s Inferno get to know one another in halting conversations that revolve around the other person’s ideal type, usually described as “cat-” or “dog-like”.

Mild sizzle happens near water, when they play competitive games in swimsuits, or in the swimming pools of Paradise – the high point of erotic abandon, when dating couples might brush hands and make eyes, but no more.

When they retire for the night, they rarely share a bed. Simply put, the show is gloriously uneventful. And we can’t look away.

The wildly popular series was the first South Korean reality show to crack Netflix’s leaderboard of top 10 most-watched shows globally in its first season (2021 to 2022). Its fifth season, which aired its finale on Feb 10, placed second on the list of the top non-English TV series.

Notably, the season with the least innocent bed scene, its fourth in 2025, performed the poorest of the bunch.

Drama in the details

What gives? Perhaps the fundamental confusion comes from conflating the tameness of mostly polite chat with a lack of drama.

This is not what The New York Times called the “hypnotic dullness” of cancelled Japanese reality show Terrace House (2012 to 2020), where young creatives bunked together as they went about their daily lives, accruing minor wins and losses so deeply understood by the audience, they took on a literary quality.

Rather, it is the kind of dry content that encourages minute scrutiny of little interactions that in busier dating shows would be left on the cutting-room floor. This is the same way we register friction in daily life.

Appraising conduct as good, bad, inept or charming is at the core of boisterous online chatter about Single’s Inferno, which erupts almost immediately after the Tuesday airing of each episode.

In Season 5, commentors came for the self-absorption of Mina Sue, who made a show of twirling as she walked out to speak to fellow participant Min-gee’s love interest Seung-il. His curiosity about Mina Sue was in turn disappointing, and Sung-min’s possessiveness over Go-eun was a red flag, and so on.

Gossip mill

That viewers are compelled to weigh in at an inordinate scale might have something to do with the familiar and low-stakes nature of what is essentially casual dating – something most people feel qualified to speak on and the politics of which affects us more than we typically care to let on.

Judgment is baked into the show with a straight-talking panel of South Korean entertainers – including host Hong Jin-kyung and actress Lee Da-hee – who supply the gasps, groans and snarky interjections in our place.

“That’s enough now, you’ve gone too far,” they have said of the divisively wishy-washy Mina Sue’s vacillation.

In short, it is appointment gossiping, the ideological thrust of which is: All is not fair in love and war. Get to an episode late and you are wont to be tyrannised with spoilers online or in person.

It is guilt-free gossiping, too, perhaps because audiences feel a greater entitlement to a group of contestants assumed to be fame-hungry.

Any naturalism the production goes for is undercut by the lengthy entertainment CVs of virtually all its participants, who tend to be influencers hoping to break into TV, serial dating show hoppers, pageant winners or actors.

Sleuths dig up the brands and prices of clothes worn on the show, supposedly “exposing” well-off participants.

All the video montage blather about them being students and opticians is quickly exposed as half-truths. Things can get ugly, though, when hateful comments towards certain contestants tip into voluble cyberbullying.

But that is another article.

Communal punditry is not the only plank of Single’s Inferno’s strange appeal. There is the tacit draw of witnessing underrepresented Asian sex appeal.

Male viewers, in particular, seem to home in on different scenes than women, lingering on the largeness of a man’s physique (and what effect that has on other male players) or taking notes on confident/bumbling overtures.

Because it is Netflix, the content goes down all too smoothly too, though one wonders if the show would have hit such heights had it debuted on a platform without the 1.5x speed watching function.

The drama is light and not exhausting, kind of like bingsu. It is mostly ice, but there is enough sweetness and crunch to make for decent dessert.