‘Skyscraper Live’: Where to Watch, Who’s Climbing and What Happens If He Falls

Calling all adrenaline junkies, Netflix has a broadcast specifically for you this week. Well, it’s specifically for adrenaline junkies who are probably not also stressed out by heights.

Rescheduled to Saturday due to weather concerns, professional climber Alex Honnold will be scaling his next mountain — except it’s not a mountain. Instead, he’ll be free-climbing a literal skyscraper, and yes, free-climbing means exactly what you think it does. He’ll have no ropes or harnesses attached, no safety nets to land in, he’s just…climbing a building.

Here’s what you need to know about the two-hour special.

What time does he start?

The climb will begin at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET on Netflix, on Saturday, Jan. 24. It will be streamed live, so you can see the whole thing.

Who is this climbing maniac?

Alex Hannold is a professional rock climber, who you might recognize from the documentary “Free Solo.” He’s a veteran at climbing.

Which skyscraper is he climbing?

Hannold will be scaling Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world. As you likely guessed from its name, the building is in Taiwan.

How tall is this building?

In total, Taipei 101 has, well, 101 stories. It’s 1,667 feet tall.

Uh, why is he doing this?

In Hannold’s own words: “Why not?” According to the climber, the building is “possible, which a lot of skyscrapers aren’t — it’s uniquely suited for climbing.”

There’s really no nets or fallbacks?

It appears not. Hannold will truly solo climb and he admitted to Tudum himself that “My life is on the line.”

What happens if he falls?

According to Hannold himself, if something goes wrong, he’ll probably die, as he explained to CNN during a recent sit-down interview. However, as he noted, with this particular building, there are a lot of balconies spread out across a long stretch of the climb “The geometry of the building, the shape of the building is such that you actually could fall in tons of places and not actually die,” Hannold described, “which makes it in some ways safer than a lot of rock-climbing objectives.”

In the same interview, Hannold described it as a low-risk, high-consequence activity — meaning that, most likely, he’ll incur no injury at all, but if something goes wrong, the stakes are extremely high. In contrast, he describes sports football as high-risk, lower-consequence, since athletes regularly have career-ending, but not life-ending, accidents on the field.

Producers have also clarified that there will be a 10-second delay, and if the worst should happen, they will cut away.

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