Oh No, Is Squid Game: The Challenge … Good?

The adaptation of Netflix’s capitalism-skewering phenomenon is so openly venal it might just reinvent reality TV. Photo: Netflix

I know what you’re thinking. Believe me, I thought so too.

The notion that Squid Game, Netflix’s surprise global phenomenon from 2021, has been turned into a real-life game show suggests the sound of a snake sucking its own tail. Here we have a bracing K-drama about a sadistic competition in which hundreds of financially struggling people are invited to participate in deadly children’s games, all for a chance at ungodly wealth, co-opted of its aesthetics for the purposes of crass entertainment. Nobody dies in the real-world game show, of course, but the effort is terrifyingly cynical nevertheless. With Squid Game: The Challenge, Netflix has seemingly taken Hwang Dong-hyuk’s stridently anticapitalist series (which it commissioned, and therefore controls), ripped its provocative critique from its chest, and used the defiled carcass as foundation for an adult amusement park. Mr. Beast, that YouTube carnival barker, has already shown us this movie once before, but here the scale is so much larger, so much closer to the source. It’s hard not to feel queasy about the death of irony when confronted with this enterprise.

And yet. Here I sit before you, convinced that not only does Squid Game: The Challenge qualify as damn good reality television, it even serves as an unexpectedly effective adaptation of the original K-drama. The game show uses the language of modern reality television to realize, in its own strange way, the themes in Dong-hyuk’s parable of capitalism grinding human beings into dust. That reality television itself is an artifact of late-stage capitalism only underscores the point.

It takes its time getting there, however. The game show opens on a montage that borders on cosplay: Squid Game’s signature choral motif plays in the background as contestants standing on curbsides in cities all over the world wait to be picked up, mirroring that pivotal scene in the original series. As the show eases into its introduction, snippets of confessionals begin to form the backbone of its storytelling. “People do a whole lot more for a whole lot less,” one player says, remarking upon the competition’s $4.56 million prize pot. “Who’s not in debt?” says another. “I’m not getting paid at work for this. But you’re dreaming; you’re taking a chance. What’s it like to pay off your house?” Squid Game: The Challenge is deceptively good at extracting narratives from its massive pool of 456 contestants, with an omniscient gaze constantly moving between players, emphasizing their disposability: People are introduced, given just enough backstory to pull at the heart strings, and provided the shape of an arc, only to be unceremoniously eliminated. (There are drawbacks to the approach, of course. Unfamiliar faces often provoke a who? response.)

Owing to the scripted series’ tremendous popularity, players generally go into the experience with a rough sense of what they’re in for. But The Challenge deploys a fair number of twists, including a social game that primarily manifests in the form of smaller “tests of character” explicitly designed to sow chaos within player relationships. This element is crucial to the punch of this adaptation, because it ends up filling a thematic gap left by the absence of, well, death. The simplest of these challenges involves a choice between conferring advantages to others or simply eliminating them outright, but as the game progresses, these tests become unpredictable, and players are made to act with little clarity over the ramifications. Where the raw force of the K-drama’s viscerality was rooted in how (fictional) players died in horrible and ignoble ways, the game show relocates a great deal of that impact in the social violence (very real) players inflict upon each other in the name of $4.56 million.

This is where the reality show finds its texture as an unconventional adaptation of Squid Game. The potency of that show’s critique is rooted in how it bakes capitalism into a metaphor of a deadly contest, one that is unfeeling, brutal, arbitrary in its rewards and punishments, and fundamentally cruel in its design. Unbelievably, The Challenge extracts many of those same ideas from the reality-show format. Players might believe they deserve to win, but the system is ultimately indifferent to their story. A subtle competitor might try to keep their head down, but the social game will compel others to target them. Those seeking justice or revenge might try to mete it out, but the mechanics are hostile to such pursuits. Worst of all, groups might even try to collectively organize to make trials more fair, but they’re always at risk of one person choosing to break the chain out of pure self-interest.

By literalizing the metaphor of the K-drama, The Challenge counterintuitively extracts uncanny, perhaps even sharper expressions of that metaphor. Indeed, the absence of death, and therefore the removal of Squid Game’s dark fantasy, brings that central simulacra of capitalism ever so evocatively closer to the real thing. Hell is people working in a system designed to turn them against each other. They can’t overthrow the game — in fact, they welcome it — so the only pertinent question is: Who will they choose to be?

The sheer scale of the new series provides a storytelling challenge. It largely sticks to the source material’s architecture, which means assembling hundreds of people in a faithful replica of the K-drama’s distressingly cheerful arenas. What’s immediately arresting is the spectacle. It hits you in the opening “red light, green light” trial — which, by the way, features the return of our favorite giant robot doll, Chantal — as an ocean of green jumpsuits pours into the playground set. By the end, about half of the contestants make it through, once again mirroring the outcome in the show. Not every aspect of the adaptation works cleanly, though. That initial sense that you’re watching empty cosplay is exacerbated by how The Challenge handles the metaphor of death: Eliminated players are often marked by an ink pack exploding on their chest, to which they respond by keeling over as if they’ve actually died.

But the way production adapts each trial to real-world gameplay is fairly impressive; a technical highlight is the hopscotch game, which preserves an unsettling sense of the abyss when players fall through the tile. The scale imparts a real sense of ominous grandeur when the game forces players into narratively desirable positions, with the show toggling its focus between those who respond admirably and those who have the worst brought out of them. It’s a high-wire act, and at times it comes impressively close to replicating Squid Game’s particular K-drama viscerality: cruel turns that inflect an aching pain in the heart.

Let’s be clear about this. Squid Game: The Challenge is a venal creation. Netflix is trying to have its cake and eat it too, and I don’t want to impose more artistic intentionality than is actually there. It’s unclear whether its producers are interested in grappling with the moral aspects of Dong-hyuk’s creation; that answer will reveal itself in how The Challenge handles the final turn of Squid Game’s first season, which ends on a mildly humanistic note I personally never found convincing. (Critics were not given the last episode of The Challenge for preview.) But The Challenge projects itself with a refreshing frankness: about what it’s trying to do, what the game of reality television as a whole does to its participants, how those people behave in response. It feels honest, as though it doesn’t have to dress up what it’s doing in some loftier bullshit idea. In that sense, Squid Game: The Challenge isn’t just a good reality show. It’s a morally righteous one.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the number of contestants and amount of prize money.