The big problem with Netflix's new smash hit
It's #1 in 76 countries, and sums up a whole weird era
This week we finally shut the door on The Spinoff’s oldest podcast. Jane Yee, Alex Casey and I have been recapping different reality TV shows, mostly from around here, since 2015. We recorded a live-streamed 90 minute finale, shed a few tears and shut the door on easily the most fun professional experience of my life.
It feels apposite timing, then, to be reviewing Squid Game: The Challenge, a new reality TV show for the globalised culture era, which is partly why both New Zealand television is suffering and the Real Pod had to come to an end. The period in which we all — or a lot of us — watched cheerfully mid-budget local productions is winding down, replaced by an era in which our culture can come from anywhere. There’s a lot that’s good and liberating in that, but we’re losing something, too. The issues are impacting our local TV scene thick and fast, some of which I’ll touch on below. Until then, here’s what I think of this new megahit from Netflix.
– Duncan Greive, Rec Room editor
Even by modern standards, the speed of integrity decay is somewhat shocking. When Squid Game emerged in 2021, it had taken a strange path to becoming an international mega hit. The show came out during Auckland’s lengthy lockdown of 2021 and struck a chord here and everywhere with its brutal commentary on class disparity and end game capitalism in South Korea.
Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote the show in 2009 but could not get it made for a decade until Netflix picked it up during a drive to increase its international slate. Perversely, that delay was the luckiest break he could have got, as it came out during a time when there was suddenly both a global audience for Korean drama and a dyspeptic mood ready to hear his message.
It was a show that got so many things right, which is why it’s such a bummer to see that Squid Game: The Challenge has almost nothing to redeem it — all just two years after its parent debuted. The premise is broadly identical. 456 people, nominally from all over the world (though almost all from the US and the UK, based on the first episode) gather to run non-fatal versions of the Squid Game gauntlets, all with the hope of being the last one standing, and taking home a claimed world record game show prize of US$4.56m.
It’s a banal betrayal of the original in that while its sets are painstakingly rendered, the participants' backstories are barely sketched — meaning they just read as a bunch of clean, fit, English-speaking people who would quite like a bunch of money. There has been little thought to transposing the undercurrents and differing motivations across, simply the games themselves, which are already underway before the show is 10 minutes old.
This is shockingly fast and means we have no emotional connection to any participants. Married at First Sight spends weeks meeting and marrying off its couples. The Traitors has us drilling into motive for long periods before we start to rid ourselves of many faithful. Even Physical 100, the Korean show from earlier this year, which was compared to Squid Game, took care to spend most of an hour walking us through the wildly different lives of its people. When they finally began to fall, we cared.
While it’s a British production, most of the early voices are from the US, with little sense of location or where, specifically, the participants are from. If the show is chilling, it’s not the bitter satire of its parent. It makes flesh the cheerfully borderless cultural reality of the Netflix/Spotify world, where fragile national cultures are overwhelmed by these supercharged tech giants. One global nation under Netflix.
The first challenge is red light, green light, a form of musical statues, with paintballs substituting for bullets. There’s none of the tension of the original season. Not because people aren’t dying (duh), but because no one on screen has had a chance to believe they might win yet. This is amended somewhat once we spend time in the giant, windowless bunkroom. An unexpected false start to the second challenge delivers a nod to the moral complexity of the original Squid Game.
Yet by then, the cynicism is already bedded in and hard to unsee. The reality show feels like it ties together a number of threads that wrap our current cultural moment. Firstly, there’s the franchise era, where any available IP at scale is constantly being recycled and exploited, degrading like an old jpeg in the process. Second, the weird blandness that comes with making shows for a whole-of-world audience. Third, the highly intentional way that sharp edges are sanded blunt — in this case, the social commentary, which is the heart of Squid Game, being abandoned in favour of very route one reality TV survival tropes.
Squid Game: The Challenge is already a predictable smash hit, sitting at #1 for Netflix in 76 countries. But for all its budget and prize pool, it can’t touch the other breakout reality hit of 2023. Alone as a franchise is nearing a decade on screens, but it became a phenomenon in 2023, with multiple accessible series available on both Netflix and TVNZ+, along with the slightly ropey Alone: Australia (which will be improved in 2024 by being shot in New Zealand).
Its solitude, intimacy and contemplation of humanity’s relationship with nature contrast so jarringly with this so-expensive-its-dirt-cheap IP cash-in. Don’t waste a day in The Challenge’s bleakly artificial world – head to Alone: Tales from the Arctic (TVNZ+) to experience the true state of the art of the reality genre.
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Last week, we launched our first PledgeMe campaign since 2016 (!) to do something new and exciting for us — a new project examining the nature and culture of food in New Zealand called What’s eating Aotearoa. We’ve just added a new reward for TV and film fans. Spinoff pop culture, film and TV aficionados Alex Casey and Tara Ward will create a personalised watch list to binge for a weekend or to keep you going through 2024. Pledge Now.
Quick pop culture hits
Here’s what’s new to streaming this week – most exciting: the return of Apple TV’s superb Slow Horses
Sam Brooks visits the set for the My Kitchen Rules finale
If you only read one story this week, make it Maddie Holden’s gorgeous reflection on David Bowie’s monster Western Springs concert, which took place 40 years ago this week
A podcast and oral history of the revelatory moment when it was discovered Sky One was playing soft porn after midnight
Comedian James Roque makes an economic case for funding comedy like we do theatre. Good case, bad timing, unfortunately (see below).
Stuff’s Amberleigh Jack covers Spotify’s annual Wrapped package, showing the biggest artists in and from New Zealand as blandly unchanged, which is not surprising (see last week’s Rec Room)
Here’s a link to our daily one question quiz, in partnership with Skinny – please kindly get amongst.
The sound is off: Part two
When we published a hyper-extended version of last week’s Rec Room on The Spinoff earlier this week, it surprised me with just how well-read it was. It shot through 10,000 reads in no time, which is a lot for a fairly dense story about structural challenges to the business of being a musician. It also coincided with a trio of appearances by ex-Spinoff staffer Chris Schulz talking about the death of music media on The Front Page, MediaWatch and The Fold. One question came from a reader, and I saw rattling around the place. They asked, “Why have the media axed their pages?” Not in a blaming way, but why did they stop carrying that content? Was it because they knew their readers were not tuning in for it anymore?”
I wanted to address that because The Spinoff did it too. We rely on a mix of reader revenue through Members (and our PledgeMe campaign – please, please give if you can) and partnerships with mostly large organisations. In the 2000s, music was hot property, and record companies and promoters were big spenders. That’s almost all gone to social media. And unlike many forms of culture writing, like books, there is no government support for writing about music (which I think is a mistake). I wish The Spinoff published more music writing. I hope we do again one day. But that’s why we don’t right now.
(Another friend at a record label joked that if we all just did music journalism instead of mourning its death, there would be a lot more music journalism in the world — which is funny — but the point is this is a flare-up, and none of us discussing it can do it as a day job, the way it needs to be done).
Read more: Sam Brooks reports on a big shake up at Creative NZ and Chris Schulz on the same organisation’s bold new report.
Will the vision be off, too?
I had a vague hope that the anti-media posturing of some parts of this coalition would pass once they got into government. That lasted about three hours before the deputy prime minister started telling the media, “you lost,” and falsely claiming the Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) was a giant bribe (read BusinessDesk’s application to the PIJF, which they have admirably made public, to understand how indefensible that is). Still, Winston Peters losing his head requires others keep theirs, something NZ on Air board member and former TVNZ exec Andy Shaw failed to do, becoming another example of inexplicable clout-chasing on LinkedIn.
Not that what he said was wrong, but he needed to let someone else say it instead of fueling an already hostile situation. That’s not the only trouble on the horizon. While the coalition was being announced, the NZ Film Commission quietly referred someone to the Serious Fraud Office over alleged breaches of screen production rebates. If prosecuted, this would be a gift to the scheme’s antagonists — one of whom will be our next deputy prime minister. The point of all this is that our already fragile creative sector looks like it’s in for a wild ride, and it may have a big impact on what you see and hear from this country next year.
Three scoops cricket rights, while The Project bows tonight
This story was so small as to be barely reported but also too strange not to glance at. Early this week, Three sent out a press release bragging about having secured rights to the Black Caps’ test series with Bangladesh. It secured them well beyond the 11th hour, announcing it the day before the first test in Sylhet. Why so curious? Because TVNZ is the home of cricket in summer, thanks to picking up Spark Sports’ rights deal when it closed. And Sky is mostly home during winter.
Three’s ultra-tactical play jarred with its general focus on cost-cutting, as epitomised by the end of the well-loved 7pm staple The Project. I’ll be heading along to the final recording tonight and will write about it early next week.
Read more: Here’s Jesse Mulligan explaining his reading list and Kanoa Lloyd recounting her life in TV
