The internet is full of people doing spectacularly inadvisable things in the name of curiosity. Discovery Channel sent five Filipino comedians to explain exactly why — using actual science. Results may vary.
You Have Been Warned Asia arrives as a deceptively simple premise: take the format of the long-running UK series You Have Been Warned — which built its audience on clips of people doing catastrophically stupid things — and add Filipino comedians, actual scientific analysis, and a genuine commitment to explaining why the physics of a home-made rocket sled is more interesting than the inevitable explosion. The result, across 14 episodes, is one of the more entertaining pop-science shows to come out of Southeast Asia in recent memory.
The series was produced by Jesuit Communications Foundation, commissioned by Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific as part of Rohit Tharani's 2017 wave of 16 regional originals. It ran on Discovery Channel across Southeast Asia from 2017 into 2018 and earned genuine press attention in the Philippines, where the hosts are cultural figures in their own right. The framing — comedians as scientists, science as comedy — is not new, but the specific energy of the Filipino cast gives it something fresh.
The internet is full of home-made inventions, human guinea pigs, nature-obsessed thrillers and pure adrenaline junkies. You Have Been Warned Asia deconstructs the science behind the experiments and exactly why they shouldn't be attempted at home. Five Filipino science enthusiasts front the series, blending genuine scientific explanation with the kind of comedy that makes the medicine go down.
The show's success rests entirely on its cast, and Discovery made the right call picking five of the Philippines' sharpest comedic personalities. Each brings a different kind of energy to the science desk — from Lourd De Veyra's sardonic cultural commentary to Jun Sabayton's willingness to physically demonstrate a concept at personal risk.
Science, like laughter, is imminent — and You Have Been Warned Asia proves both can occupy the same space at the same time.
— Philstar, on You Have Been Warned AsiaThe structure is straightforward: each episode takes a selection of viral internet videos — the kind that circulate on social media with captions like "do NOT try this at home" — and subjects them to genuine scientific analysis. What is the physics of that trampoline catapult? What force is actually being applied when someone tries to open a water bottle with their face? Why does a potato cannon work at all, and what would happen if you scaled it up?
The comedians are not just playing scientists for laughs. Each host brings real curiosity to the material, and the show is careful to make the science genuinely accessible rather than using it as set-dressing for the comedy. The Jesuit Communications Foundation production background — JCF is the media arm of the Philippines' Jesuit community, with a long history of educational content — shows in the care taken to get the explanations right while still being entertaining.
Philippine media covered the show extensively: Philstar, Esquire Philippines, Orange Magazine, and Inquirer.net all ran features on the cast ahead of the premiere, with Jun Sabayton's leukemia diagnosis in the midst of production becoming an unexpected and moving subplot to the show's press narrative. Bworldonline covered the series alongside a TLC festival of regional shows — the two Discovery Network channels running complementary content in the same programming period.
The series was produced by Jesuit Communications Foundation — a significant choice, given JCF's track record of making educational content compelling rather than earnest. The combination of their editorial discipline and the Filipino cast's natural comedic timing is what separates You Have Been Warned Asia from a straightforward clip show. Rohit Tharani commissioned it as part of Discovery's 2017 commitment to local Southeast Asian originals, a slate that also included Surviving Borneo and Frontier Borneo from Malaysia.