By Lily Bourne
Remember watching Netflix’s hit show Squid Game back in 2021, rooting for Player 456 and his friends as they fought for the chance to escape their desperate circumstances? Remember how important the social commentary of the series was, and how it criticized today’s capitalistic societies? Well, what if I told you that Netflix just released Squid Games: The Challenge, a game show where 456 real people compete for 4.56 million dollars by participating in the same challenges the original television characters were subject to? Sound a little off-putting? I agree.
The importance of the original show was to highlight the consequences of a late-capitalistic world, where the top one percent have amassed enormous amounts of wealth, leaving the lower classes in economic depression. Although they were fictional, the characters all faced real-world problems. Many of the game participants were deeply in debt, including the protagonist. This common struggle put the characters in a vulnerable position where the only way to escape their financial crisis was to volunteer for the potentially lethal Squid Game. The show was written back in 2009 by Hwang Dong-hyuk, a South Korean film director. The idea came to him amid South Korea’s growing economic crisis, where the total personal debt has now exceeded the nation’s total GDP. He utilized the show to bring awareness to the lengths people will go to escape their situations, describing “Squid Games” as “an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life.” Clearly, the show was meant to highlight the desperate situations many lower-class people face, and to criticize the idea of wealthy people utilizing those situations for entertainment and profit. However, Netflix’s new game show ignores all of this entirely.
Squid Games: The Challenge is formatted very similarly to the fictional plot. 456 contestants join and they are eliminated one by one throughout ten episodes, with one lucky contestant going home with 4.56 million dollars. One major difference between the original show and the reality television series arises in the elimination process since contestants were shot on-site in the original. Instead, participants on The Challenge are outfitted with fake blood bags under their shirts which explode while they play dead. The challenges differ slightly from the original series, but many of the most popular scenes were dutifully recreated. Real-life contestants find themselves carving dalgona candies, playing marbles, and jumping across a glass bridge. Just like any good reality show, alliances are made and broken and the drama continues to the very end. But while this game show may seem fun at first sight, its lighthearted premise reveals a darker truth upon closer examination. Just like in the fictional show, many of the contestants on Squid Games: The Challenge volunteered as a way to help themselves out of a difficult situation, or to pay for expensive life costs. Thus, the inherent problem with Squid Game: The Challenge emerges. Basing a gameshow on a series created to criticize the wealthy for utilizing people’s struggles for entertainment is a recipe for disaster. The producers of The Challenge clearly disregarded the show’s original message, as the entire concept of it demonstrates exactly what the original was satirizing: struggling people fighting with each other for viewers’ entertainment. While the show itself may be fun to watch, and the winner may be deserving of those 4 million dollars, it is important to note the hypocrisy of the show’s theme. Squid Game: The Challenge’s mere existence only enhances the original anti-capitalistic message of the original Squid Game, and provides yet another example of profit-hungry executives preying on the situations of the less fortunate.