It’s just a game. A phrase that becomes pretty loaded, depending on the stakes of said game — your chance at fame or fortune being on the line, perhaps. Maybe even your life, depending on how dystopian the situation might be. This brings us to Squid Game: The Challenge, a season of television that hurts the brain to contemplate, because… well, did anyone involved in making this show actually watch Squid Game?
I’m not saying the show fails to capture the aesthetic or essential gameplay as depicted in the pop culture obsession of 2021 — but its existence is a shocking misstep that only makes sense if the producers involved in creating The Challenge were completely unaware of anything Squid Game the show was trying to say. Did they just skim the Wikipedia entry, study some production photos? I like believing in this theory, because it beats believing that Squid Game: The Challenge was made this way on purpose, by people who watched the whole season and still thought this was a good idea. The latter theory is such a bummer.
For those who didn’t tune into the original show, Squid Game told the story of an underground competition, in which 456 strangers in desperate need of money battled to win 45.6 billion won, primarily by surviving a series of children’s games where losers were quickly eliminated via gunshot. The violence was visceral and shocking: Dozens of players left bleeding on the ground during the opening game of Red Light, Green Light, with armed guards shooting those who failed the Dalgona cookie challenge as soon as their cookie cracked. The amount of death was matched only by the randomness of it, ensuring that the tension never eased once over those eight episodes.
There’s no blood seen in Squid Game: The Challenge, though. And its players (unlike the ones in the show) are all eager volunteers, who wear black ink packs around their necks, which explode to simulate their untimely ends as the game progresses. Because it’s a game, but an incredibly muddled one, played with pretend stakes but some real money on the table — not quite the grand prize of the Korean original, but $4.56 million is still more than four times what a winner of Survivor gets.
Even before reality competition shows like American Idol, Big Brother, and Survivor rose to prominence in the early 2000s, writers and directors had been exploring the idea of the modern-day Colosseum as seen on TV: 1987’s The Running Man, based on a story by Stephen King, stands out as a prominent example, but sci-fi staples like Doctor Who, Star Trek, and The Twilight Zone also played in this territory decades before the world had to deal with Ryan Seacrest or Jeff Probst.
The difference between those fictional death games and Squid Game is that technically, because the titular game is conducted in secret, its players are in it for only the money. Meanwhile, the difference between Squid Game and real-life, non-lethal, reality competitions is that there’s no chance for fame and fortune as a result of winning, or even as a runner-up. (Since there are no runners-up.) Squid Game: The Challenge attempts to operate somewhere in a nebulous middle ground. It doesn’t work.
I started watching The Challenge out of professional curiosity — much for the same reason I pressed play on the original Squid Game, a few days after it tore its way up the Netflix charts to become the show of Fall 2021. In both cases, I confess, that professional curiosity gave way to actual bingeing, because once the game was in progress I was helpless to pull away from its momentum. As disturbing as I found it.
Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk combined a lot of compelling elements together to make his show so addictive, but a key aspect was his use of episode cliffhangers, literally keeping players poised on the verge of death as a dare to the viewer, to keep watching. The Challenge mimics this strategy quite effectively, even while perverting the original story’s intentions.
It’s quite a Catch-22: The show is produced by British production companies Studio Lambert and the Garden, people who know how to make a good reality show (including series like Undercover Boss and Naked Attraction). Making a good reality show, though, means that the series unfortunately can’t commit to an equally ugly perspective on the fact that this show exists, as per Hwang Dong-hyuk’s core message.
In The Challenge, there are heroes and villains established early on; touching stories of connection mingled with the occasional backstabbing. Like the game Survivor, alliances and people skills prove to be just as valuable as actual gameplay, at least if you want to avoid making yourself a target — many of the players actually want to play in a cooperative manner, like it’s a team sport. It’s sweet, in a way, even if it’s antithetical to the entire enterprise. And players are eliminated with either great bombast or quietly, after a quick test backfires on them — making it all feel increasingly random.
As the meme goes, we have invented the Torment Nexus. Kind of literally, when you think about it, as these players do not have a great time. (And what has been published about conditions on set indicates that the cameras didn’t capture the worst of it.)
While watching players flop back onto the sand to mimic being killed by a headshot, I was reminded of another reality show currently streaming on Netflix: One of the goofier Netflix originals to date, The Floor Is Lava features teams of adults attempt to traverse complicated obstacle courses set in a single room where — you guessed it — touching the “lava” gets you eliminated; when someone does slip and fall, they sink below the (artificial) lava with great drama, while their teammates scream playfully in anguish. (How does someone scream painfully in anguish? You have to watch The Floor Is Lava to find out.)
That show is fun, because it’s a children’s game being played by adults, and the stakes are impossibly low. The Challenge, meanwhile, also features children’s games being played by adults, but in pretending that the stakes are much higher than they actually are, the entire enterprise feels trivialized.
Squid Game: The Challenge (Netflix)
Ultimately, the most annoying aspect of Squid Game: The Challenge is that it’s actually a pretty decent competition show, completely devoid of any context. However, we do not live in a time devoid of context, and the sheer fact of its existence makes a mockery of the brute-force messages being passed down by the original series.
The power of Squid Game the series was two-fold — it was exceptionally skilled at knowing how the drama of a reality competition can be an addictive narrative, while the brutality of its violence made sure every moment of triumph was bittersweet and hard-earned. It showcased just how depraved a person could become, for a life-changing amount of money. It had a point.
The Challenge also showcases how depraved the pursuit of money can be. But in this case, it’s not the players who are guilty. It’s the people making the show.
Five episodes of Squid Game: The Challenge are streaming now on Netflix.