Floor is Lava - game show on Netflix

From a glance this show based on a game that all of us probably played at one time or another as kids has a lot of potential but basically in a shell it falls flat due to bad production decisions and some pretty terrible acting on the part of the participants.

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The idea is pretty simple: Teams of 3 enter a room where the floor is some red colored bubbling water and they have to make it from one side of the room to the other. There are multiple methods they can use to make this happen but honestly, everyone ends up taking pretty much the same path.

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There are various levels that are exhibited in different episodes such as "basement" "living room" and "bedroom." Each of these levels almost certainly take place in the same actual room in the studio, unless they happened to have 10 different swimming pool rooms complete with obstacle courses in them.

This is actually one of the main problems I have with the show, there is only one "room" featured per episode and honestly, once you have seen one group attempt to go through the course, the next group is almost certainly going to have the same strategy, or lack of one. The contestants are meant to be completely unfamiliar with the rooms but it is more than a little bit obvious that they have already been shown the rooms since they seem to know the path already.

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The teams, who are aware of the fact that this is a time trial, also spend a lot of time chatting and screwing around rather than working towards the end goal, which leads me to believe that a lot of this game show is probably rehearsed. The courses also seem to offer a tremendous advantage to whatever team happens to go first.

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A lot of the surfaces they encounter are slick when wet and since the tv team feels compelled to throw "lava" at the contestants it means the 2nd and 3rd team face a far more difficult run than the 1st ones do because the surfaces were dry during their runs.

The trailer is pretty exciting and that is what got me to watch it in the first place but the action becomes pretty monotonous really fast but I suppose there is only so much that they could do when it takes the teams an average of 5 - 8 minutes total to get through the course or fail trying.

Plus once you have seen the first group go through the course it isn't very exciting watching the next group do essentially the same thing again.

While I would like to actually DO one of these courses, I can't say that it is very entertaining to watch on TV.

Should I watch it?

Well, to see what it is all about sure, but I would only count on enjoying this show if you have command of the remote and use the remote frequently. This is because for every 1 minute of excitement there is 5 minutes of boredom.