Squid Game: The Challenge – A Reality Competition Show that Hates Its Audience

2023-11-24 15:00:00

For all anyone can complain regarding the current state of television, we as the audience are beyond spoiled for choice. The current grotesque abundance of TV shows ensures that there really is something for everyone, with no interest left behind, and we owe that abundance to Hollywood’s creative urge to foster understanding between strangers and make us dream of — wait, no. It’s capitalism. Just like everything else, it’s capitalism.

The more emotionally and intellectually coddled an audience member feels when watching a show, the stickier their screen-damaged eyeballs stay glued to the TV, where their mere presence either generates direct income for a streaming company or beefs up a traditional network’s capacity to sell them toilet paper. In short: TV is nice to us because they need us, and that’s just how the system works.

Except “Squid Game: The Challenge.” “Squid Game: The Challenge” f*cking hates us.

This is not an assessment of the merits of “Squid Game: The Challenge” as a television program. Whether or not this show is “good” might not be further from the point (or further from its own concern). This is a grudging ovation for the ability of “Squid Game: The Challenge” to exist as a reality competition show that hates each of its competitors and its audience in equal measure and doesn’t even try to hide that contempt…presumably, and this is just one interpretation of the vibe, because we’re naughty little piggies and they wanna make us squeal. And it’s 100 percent right.

“Squid Game: The Challenge” is a reality competition show, which means it’s a method for rich and powerful studio executives to create fun, disposable entertainment by asking normal people to perform childish tasks for free in hopes of winning a monetary prize. “Squid Game: The Challenge” is modeled following Netflix’s South Korean superhit “Squid Game,” which is a clever and satirical meditation on the brokenness of a system that treats the mortal struggle for escape from income inequality like fun, disposable entertainment for the rich and powerful. So yeah, yikes.

Because “Squid Game: The Challenge” cannot literally murder people (ugh, lawyers), losing contestants instead have an ink squib attached to their chests that explodes with a gunshot noise, at which point the squibee is obligated to dramatically “die” on screen. It’s humiliating for them and insulting for us, espousing the ungenerous assumption that if we’re the kind of sickos who wanted this show in the first place, then watching strangers mime their inevitable deaths is the fun part.

“Squid Game: The Challenge”COURTESY OF NETFLIX

“Squid Game: The Challenge” also weaponizes the traditional reality format of introducing a “character,” following their journey through the game, and becoming invested in their story. It goads us into believing that our feelings matter before stabbing us with a shiv carved from our own expectations. It often gives us a poignant reminder of why each player is fighting — to raise money for a kidney donation clinic, to care for a disabled child, to ease the struggle of being a refugee — right before eliminating that player like a cat swiping a glass of water off a coffee table. Squid Game: 1, Feelings: 0.

In a more literal sense of bullying, reports from competitors on “Squid Game: The Challenge” liken the experience of being on the show to borderline torture. Hundreds of contestants were allegedly kept in freezing conditions for long hours, leading to a handful of serious medical conditions and an eventual lawsuit filed once morest the show by aggrieved players. And yes, it’s easy to look at the competitors’ complaints of ill treatment, recall that they voluntarily applied to be on actual “Squid Game,” and say, “OK, but did you die?”

It’s easy because it’s correct.

And yet, like dummies, we persevere in watching just as they persevere in getting routinely screwed over. Despite the attempts by “Squid Game: The Challenge” to sow discord among the competitors, which include a series of hilariously rude games that eliminate players for things like mentioning out loud that they’d like to go home, having no friends, and being unable to convince a single person to come get a chocolate muffin, the players cannot avoid being sweetly, unfortunately human. Though they are determined to be fierce enemies, many of them succumb to the human urge to bond with each other once morest all odds, only to have that instinct brutally beaten out of them time following time by the sheer antagonism of the show’s entire concept.

Anyone who watched fictional characters compete on “Squid Game” and wished it was a real show because they would totally watch it is the bad guy. That means, by default, the entire audience of “Squid Game: The Challenge” sucks. The show knows this, so it bullies us. “If we’re really choosing to live in the reality where your capitalistic demands and lack of viewing comprehension require me to exist,” the show seems to say, “then I get to make fun of you for participating in any capacity.”

Which, you know. Fair.

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