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Whenever scientists alert us to the possibility that a notably large asteroid could strike the earth, there’s one reaction you can count on seeing on social media: “I’m rooting for the asteroid.” (This is just one of the dozens of T-shirt designs that will let you express the sentiment.) This crowd probably has a lot of crossover with the pessimists who believe A.I. will doom us all. But what if humanity’s downfall comes from neither of those, but from the rise of super-intelligent hamsters who can beat even our fittest aspirants at getting through simple mazes? We might look back on Human vs. Hamster as a warning we should have heeded, but it will be hard to get very mad about it when our new overlords are so adorable.
Human vs. Hamster, which dropped its eight-episode season on Max today, delivers exactly what you would probably hope from such a goofy title. Production designers have created essentially identical obstacle courses at both human and hamster scale. One hamster and one member of a two-human team are set loose on them simultaneously (or, at least, so the show represents them; we see them in split screen, so it’s certainly possible that the hamsters have been pre-taped at a time when there’s a lot less yelling happening around them). If the human out-performs the hamster, their team wins $1,000; if not, they get nothing. But! The humans aren’t just competing against the hamsters: Each episode features two human teams; only the winningest one proceeds to the final round, Escape the Cage, where victory over the hamster wins the human team $5,000 and a bejeweled trophy shaped like a hamster’s water bottle.
If that sounds a lot like the sort of nonsense you vaguely remember from your early-COVID viewing of Netflix’s Floor Is Lava, that may be because both shows are produced by A. Smith and Co.
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Plenty of comedy stars have tried to follow in the footsteps of Nicole Byer (Nailed It) or Rob Riggle (Holey Moley) and opened up new fan followings by hosting family-friendly unscripted competition shows. The results have been mixed. The front-facing camera bits on Megan Stalter’s social media probably helped her book the role of agent’s assistant Kayla on Hacks, but either she couldn’t find anything funny to do as the host of the Netflix cooking show Snack vs. Chef, or nothing she did was appropriate to air. Is It Cake? is barely a game, and Mikey Day’s off-putting manner doesn’t really help put it over. Pop Culture Jeopardy! hasn’t even premiered yet, yet fans of the main show are so mad about Colin Jost getting tapped to host it that Good Housekeeping reported on it.
So: It’s with great relief that I can say SNL’s Sarah Sherman is perfectly suited to preside over Human vs. Hamster. Each of the 10 “ham-stars” comes with an American Gladiator-ish handle — Diamond, Shadow, Lightning — and backstory. For instance, we’re told The Professor got her name because of how much she learned as a classroom pet. However, one is simply named Kevin, and is, we’re told, the great-great-grandson of Sherman’s own childhood hamster. Many jokes ensue about Kevin being a nepotism hire, including a shot of Sherman riding to set with Kevin on the limo seat next to her.
Though Sherman’s comedy is known for its weirdness, she modulates her persona just enough for a presumably largely juvenile audience. When a video package about Gnasher claims he once chewed through a cable and knocked out all the power in the studio, we see a shot of a restroom door and hear Sherman’s voice yell, “Help, help! I’m peeing in the dark!” Sherman’s signature “Chucky went to Sarah Lawrence” style is also welcome in a production where contestants are generally dressed in totally nondescript athleisure; a pair of Swiss cheese-ish palazzo pants she wears in a couple of early episodes suggest she’s all set for a potential Human vs. Mouse sequel. I also wasn’t prepared for her to be such a softy that she gets choked up at multiple human players’ impressive showings.
Sherman has been paired here with an experienced sportscaster, Kyle Brandt, who previously had a similar gig, opposite Damon Wayans Jr., on Peacock’s one-season wonder Frogger. The best I can say about him is that he doesn’t seem bothered by the many jokes at his expense from sports-agnostic Sherman. He does offer some authentically jargon-y commentary, and wisely doesn’t try to compete with Sherman as a funnyman. Their chemistry isn’t great, but I’ve definitely seen worse. From him. On Frogger.
It’s always funny to see animals doing human things (dancing, singing, wearing clothes); it’s also funny to see humans, on the show, doing animal things (running in a hamster wheel, squeezing into a bottle, searching a maze for treats). As on Holey Moley, there’s legitimate athletic skill on display, like when one human player shimmies up a vertical tube by smashing his back against one side and bracing his feet against the other; Brandt name-checks Spider-Man enthusing about this maneuver, and he isn’t wrong. Also as on Holey Moley, commentating over segments as though they were a real sporting event only emphasizes how silly it all is, particularly when we can tell a given challenge favors the hamsters on a physiological level, like in Follow Your Nose, which requires the humans to crawl through a maze on all fours when producers could have just built the maze walls to relative human height.
But even when you can plainly see that this is, fundamentally, a dumb thing for humans to do and a dumb thing for humans to watch, you may have the same reaction I did, which is to root against your own species. Supposedly, humans have higher reasoning skills than hamsters, to say nothing of our depth perception, which is far more acute. Human contestants, therefore, should be better equipped to problem-solve on the Locked Out course, in which hamsters and humans have to creep along the narrow ledge outside an apartment building set to make it to a window, crawl inside and retrieve a key. But when a hamster is more focused, or less afraid, or just faster than its human opponent, it’s exhilarating.
Just as you may develop mild contempt for even a very pure-hearted Survivor contestant when you watch another player manipulate them into acting against their own interests, so too might you find yourself jeering a nurse in scrubs — one of our healthcare heroes! — trembling so long over an obstacle that she lets a hamster beat her. The hamsters don’t even have a financial incentive to play so hard! They’re just out here for pure love of the game! (Or because they were, possibly unethically, trained to do it, though as a pet owner, I’m willing to stipulate that hamsters enjoy stimulation as much as dogs do, especially if that means I can keep watching the show without guilt.)
There are lots of reasons to root against humans at this point in history. Human vs. Hamster is arguably the most socially acceptable and low-stakes reason to do it, and offers the fuzziest alternative to root for. Having grudgingly had to manage the care of hamsters for a younger sibling in my youth, I was neutral to negative on them until this week. Now, after seeing the ingenuity, speed and heart they display in Human vs. Hamster, I would die for any of these ones.
I hope they get hundreds more seasons to deal cruel defeat to these humans — and, beyond, to all humanity. Every passing day just convinces me more how much we deserve it.