User Reviews

The guys are funny as can be and the information is actually good. The previous review says that they don't show the stingers going in their arms, but they have slow motion and zoomed in filming that shows every sting and bite that they go through.

Okay so first an foremost, let's talk about the premise: Enduring lots of insect stings and animal bites in order to rate them on an index of which hurts the worst. They reference Justin Schmidt a lot, who apparently wrote a book that does the same, but he only rated the intensity of the pain. They decided to try to expand on this, by rating not only the pain intensity, but the duration and damage.

Here's the big issue... Intensity and damage are both very subjective, and only four episodes in, I've seen them give questionable ratings in both categories. They rated bark scorpions a two on damage because it merely caused swelling, but then in another episode, they rated another insect ( I honestly forget which ) much higher even though it caused basically the same simple swelling reaction. Beyond that, the intensity rating seems very unbelievable too, since their visible reaction for some stings seems much greater, wherein they rate it very low in intensity, and then very high for other stings where in they rate it very high. Finally, the only objective rating, "duration", they seem to mix in other categories... They rate some insects as higher duration because the swelling is still present the next day, when that seems a bit more like conflating duration and damage. Really there's no controlled way that they measure the duration... You'd think to be truly scientific, one would have to graph the intensity of the pain over time, but they are just winging it.

So the whole premise of doing it for "science" is troubled by the fact that their rating method is totally unscientific, but that's okay... Is it at least good television? No, and I'll tell you why.

They begin each "sting" by going out on an obviously faked expedition to find the insect or animal in question. It's so obvious that the two hosts do not actually do any of the tracking or finding of these animals, and sometimes they will film them "collecting" the animals, but in other instances it's obvious that someone else ( probably some unpaid intern ) got to go out and get them. The episode with the harvester ants shows the hosts stumble upon ( literally ) a nest of harvester ants, and then they throw one or two of them into a case before deciding to bug out (pun intended). Yet, when it comes time to test the sting, there are hundreds of the ants in the case that they'd only tossed a couple into.

Meanwhile... It's pretty hard to believe their reactions to some of the stings and there's a whole lot of over-acting. They jump up and down, grunt, moan, yell "Oooof", and act like it's some horrendous pain... Then they sit down and rate it a 3 or a 4 or something. Meanwhile, there's clips in the introduction of one of the hosts being bitten by a Python, receiving major lacerations, and he's literally tapping out and has an expression on his face completely unlike others I've seen. I've not made it to that part of the series yet, but undoubtedly he'll rate the damage of the lacerations as only a 5 wherein the swelling from previous insects' bites they've rated 8.

The whole thing is just fundamentally flawed and poorly executed, and worst yet... It's just a ripoff of Coyote Peterson. Obviously they saw how popular his YouTube videos were, and decided, "This would make a great show, let's put it behind the facade of being scientific testing!"

One thing that also concerns me is what happens to the animals and insects they're testing. The show does not tell us whether these animals are returned to the habitat they're removed from, and from a conservationist and ethical standpoint, it seems very likely that these animals are harmed in one way or another.

The only positive I can give this show is that you will learn about a myriad of different insects and animals, but they only comment very mildly about those animal's behavior and missed the boat by a mile when it comes to the potential for this being an informative production.

tl;dr : You'll like it if you just want to see two grown men act like idiots and intentionally hurt themselves. If you were hoping for any type of scientific or informative merit, you'll be disappointed.