100 Humans: Life's Questions. Answered.

Decider said skip it. The host still wanted a second season.

Netflix dropped all eight episodes of 100 Humans: Life's Questions. Answered. on March 13, 2020. Alie Ward, Zainab Johnson, and Sammy Obeid ran the room. One hundred adults in matching blue sweats, tagged Human and a number, stood on a grid outside an office building and submitted to experiments about attraction, age, sex, bias, pain, happiness, and the senses. Joel Keller at Decider called the look vaguely dystopian, like people "dressed like they just got out of rehab." His verdict on episode one was Skip It. You will learn something, he wrote, and also despair at how dehumanizing the show is. The Guardian was ruder. Lucy Mangan said the 30-to-40-minute hours stretched time like wire. The first experiment asked whether better male dancers have higher sperm counts. latestnetflix.com's read is that Ten men donated samples, then danced with bags over their heads.The theory died on camera. , ,

That was not a Netflix invention. Broadcast Magazine reported on February 3, 2020, that Netflix had bought the Dutch format Het Instituut, created by comedians Joep van Deudekom and Rob Urgert and produced with BlazHoffski for NTR and BNNVARA. The Dutch show ran two seasons. The magazine said it was the first time a series based on a Dutch format would be produced in the United States and streamed worldwide by Netflix. Wikipedia still lists the eight English titles, all dated March 13, 2020. What Makes Us Attractive. The Best Age to Be Alive. Let's Talk About Sex. Are You Biased. Pain vs. Pleasure. How to Be Happy. Can You Trust Your Senses. Ask a Human. Runtimes sit between 32 and 41 minutes. ,

Uniforms, mugshots, and a gun-game that was not a game.

Decider walked through the attraction hour. Speed-dating in uniform versus out of uniform, cops and soldiers scoring higher in kit than in civvies. Mugshots of average faces versus attractive faces, with lighter sentences for the pretty ones. A boring story versus a funny telling of the same story. Then the dance-off, which Keller said ran at least 30 seconds per contestant and felt interminable. ScreenRant later recapped the sperm ranking. The worst dancer had a count of zero. The best dancer did not have the highest count. The science was always going to be the sideshow. The gossip was whether the 100 people were lab rats or a studio audience with clipboards. ,

Alie Ward told The National the series was a "social experiment" that also happened to be "bananas." She said the hardest day involved bias and gun violence. Contestants thought they were playing a reaction-time video game. The test showed how they reacted to people of different races. She sounded sure Netflix would order more. "I think it would be great to do more because there are so many questions that come up after you do it," she said. "I hear that from scientists all the time, because for every question that's answered there are 10 more." A second season never arrived. Radio Times printed the trailer pitch before launch. Which sex is better. What is with you and feet. Is there a right way to use the toilet. One hundred human beings placing themselves at the mercy of three hosts. Ward came from Brainchild and the podcast Ologies. Johnson and Obeid came from stand-up. The mix was the sell. Comedy science with a census of strangers. ,

The rumor after cancellation-that-was-not-announced was budget, or that the same 100 faces for eight hours wore out the joke. Nobody from Netflix printed a kill notice. What is on the record is the Dutch original, the March 13 dump, the Skip It, and a host who asked for another lap that never got scheduled.