Review: Squid Game: The Challenge - no one dies, but does anyone care?

Netflix's new reality series Squid Game: The Challenge, based on the popular Korean drama.

Reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch Squid Game: The Challenge, premiering on Netflix tonight.

SHE SAW

My journey with Squid Game: the Challenge has shaken my sense of self, leaving me unfamiliar with the person currently operating this keyboard. It started with some light eye-rolling, progressed to audible scoffs and then on to full-blown revulsion, but that unexpectedly turned to compulsion and has now advanced to desperate anticipation.

Netflix has just dropped the first five episodes of the series, which is based on the original Korean drama, but we will have to wait until next week for the following four and then another seven days for the final. The waiting is brutal.

I have only seen a handful of clips from the original series, but enough to understand that, while remorselessly violent, it’s an artful production rich in pathos and cultural criticism. The same can’t be said for The Challenge, which borrows any creativity it has from the drama, strips away the stakes - spoiler alert, none of the competitors in The Challenge actually die - and leaves you with what, at least initially, feels like an incredible waste of resources.

When the 456 contestants enter the building where the first challenge takes place, all I could think about was the amount of fabric it took to make all those green tracksuits, the amount of building materials required to make the replica set, including that giant creepy doll, and the number of human hours spent setting all of this up so competitors could attempt to run from one side to the other without getting hit by a paintball and having to pretend to die. There isn’t a song in the world - jazz standard or otherwise - that could make that seem poignant or moving.

It’s silly. It’s unimportant. It’s an attempt to turn our attention away from the very real and heartbreaking atrocities of the world. It’s even offensive in that regard. And it’s a perfect example of our capitalist need for more, more, more. We couldn’t just let Squid Game be a stand-alone piece of art. If there was to be no series two, we still had to find a way to continue to profit off the IP.

Devastatingly, by midway through episode two, I was thoroughly hooked. Of course, there are stakes; there’s $4.56 million up for grabs - the largest cash prize for a television show ever. Plus, it’s unpredictable. Just when you start to become familiar with a character, bam, they’re being marched out by a red-suited guard, eliminated, and you find you’re following someone you’ve never seen before. Most reality series are psychological experiments of some kind, but this one is particularly compelling. The challenges test the contestants in unexpected ways. It’s like the Stanford prison experiment, but with a very particular colour scheme.

They’ve got the formula exactly right, and despite my overwhelming desire to hate this show and everything it stands for, I can’t stop watching it.

HE SAW

The real challenge for producers was logistical-emotional - how to make viewers care about 456 strangers when many of us find it difficult enough to care about all the members of our own families.

This is the first reality show in history in which we never get to meet literally hundreds of cast members. Which raises the question: Why are they there in the first place?

In many, many ways, this show is a complete waste of time, money and resources. Not just for the hundreds of people who uprooted their lives for an undetermined period of time and a 0.22 per cent chance of winning even a single cent, nor just for the presumably very large crew, but also for the rest of us, watching at home, hating ourselves for how hard we’re finding it to look away and wishing we were spending our lives doing something worthwhile, like calling talkback to complain about the state of reality television.

And yes, you will have trouble looking away. This is without doubt the most compelling reality television series since Couples Therapy.

The reason for the excessive number of competitors is quickly obvious. By having 456 people in your reality show, your odds of hitting the talent jackpot are exponentially higher than with the industry standard 20. It’s not just about increasing the chances of finding contestants with mental health issues and abrasive personalities but about so dramatically inflating the number of social interactions between them that it also exponentially inflates the number of potential trainwrecks of the sort that make us feel better about our own disordered social lives.

In order not to miss any of these disasters, producers installed historically unprecedented and frankly ludicrous quantities of surveillance equipment. The set for the iconic opening challenge, “red light, green light”, contained an estimated 30 cameras; the dorm in which contestants spent most of their time 100. Forget the competitors, the people with the best case for inhumane treatment on this show are the editors.

The bottom line is this: If you throw enough s*** at a wall, some of it will stick. If you invest in a bit more s***, you can make a decent reality TV show. If you build an industrial-level s***-thrower and stock it with biblical quantities of s***, you’ve got Squid Game: The Challenge.

Squid Game: The Challenge is now streaming on Netflix.