Two years ago, Survivor kicked off its 41st season, and with it came an entirely new era for the long-running reality series.
I wrote about that season at the time, comparing it with the Netflix phenomenon Squid Game. As Survivor tinkered with new twists — many of which have since been rectified or removed — the show demonstrated a troubling disregard for fairness in its competition. If a bit dramatic, the comparison to Squid Game illustrated one of the core appeals of reality TV to an American or global audience. Squid Game may raise the stakes to a matter of life and death, but all such competitions tap into very real anxieties surrounding financial stability under late-stage capitalism.
In the case of Survivor, those anxieties have faded into the background in recent seasons. Contestants are more likely to celebrate the “experience” of being on the show, attesting to the personal growth and self-discovery that comes from a filmed Fijian marooning. When Survivor 43 contestant Jesse Lopez spoke of his lack of a safety net back home, and his desire to secure his family’s financial future, it stood out as a relative rarity in contemporary reality TV storytelling.
When Netflix announced the inevitable Squid Game: The Challenge reality series, it was rightly met with skepticism. A real-life Squid Game would seem to miss the point of the scripted series, whose cautionary themes are anything but subtle.
And yet, the unscripted adaptation is among some of the best television in 2023, arguably an upgrade over its acclaimed predecessor.
Much like the acclaimed Korean series, Squid Game: The Challenge thrives off seemingly endless reserves of suspense. Even with the source material’s life-and-death stakes lifted, there is an uncanny sense of danger lingering over the events of The Challenge. The show’s editors have a field day manufacturing tension out of the many trials and games that contestants are put through, a sweeping score and an excess of slo-mo accentuating each and every elimination. The show is immediately addicting, and how could it not be? Your heart races from the start of episode one, and the show remains uniquely committed to such suspense even as the numbers dwindle and the games stop resembling those of the Korean counterpart.
To their credit, the global cast of contestants manage to separate their season of Squid Game from the show that inspired it in some fairly essential ways. A running theme throughout The Challenge is community, as friendships — or what some might call “alliances” — form within the walls of the barebones dormitory. Players are hesitant to turn on one another, even less so here than in the scripted version, despite that version’s insistence upon killing all those who are eliminated. Whereas a fictional take on Squid Game must shape the narrative around clear conflicts and causal relationships, an unscripted iteration is at the mercy of its players, editorial trickery notwithstanding.
With no prior real-life Squid Game available as a reference, this is the rare reality competition series not so heavily steeped in its own meta. As a Survivor superfan, I enjoy the show’s constant sniffing of its own armpits. A newcomer to Survivor may find themselves overwhelmed by how casually contestants will toss around iconic names and moments of decades past. The self-referential nature of the show is part of its charm over twenty years into its lifespan, but Squid Game: The Challenge is a welcome breath of fresh air nonetheless. As players insist upon their love and compassion for one another, the show manages to elude the caustic terror of the original. If anything, it feels surprisingly uplifting. The game itself remains mentally taxing, but players largely rally in the face of such brutality (even if the eventual winner is the rare player cunning enough to cut some throats when it matters most).
The Challenge maintains a refreshing honesty across its ten episodes. Like Survivor or Love Island, the show offers the prototypical reality TV confessionals, wherein players narrate or expound upon recent events. These confessionals are not always consequential to a reality show’s storytelling, but Squid Game renders them vital by encouraging a kind of bluntness in its contestants. Players openly characterize the game as sadistic torture, criticizing its relentless nature. On one hand, the exploitation of that suffering for the sake of television can appear rather cruel. But on the other hand, the show’s embrace of its own depravity feels like the only appropriate response to its complicated existence.
The show also sets itself apart via several pre-recorded interviews in which players discuss their backgrounds outside of the show. Squid Game is far from the first reality show to flesh its characters out via sob stories and personal histories, but these moments feel uniquely urgent here, with $4.56 million on the line. Layoffs and health scares are common themes among the show’s cast of characters, unfortunate reminders of the desperate realities that lead one to consider an experience such as this one.
Of course, without death on the line, the decision seems a bit easier. But these pre-show interviews are cleverly integrated in such a way that viewers would be forgiven if they began to genuinely fear for their favorite players’ safety. Players speak to us from a nondescript interrogation room, wearing their everyday street clothes. There is an eerie sense of doom lingering over these particular confessionals, as if players are divulging their life’s secrets in their final moments.
Simply put, Squid Game: The Challenge is dramatic. It makes for sensational television, but it also makes for some sensationalized television. I am not interested in litigating the morality of the show’s existence; it is far too entertaining to dissolve into that kind of discourse. But I am interested in the show’s undying commitment to its own brand of tension, its uncanny ability to force us into a feedback loop of more, more, more.
In many ways, Squid Game: The Challenge is a commercial. A commercial for its source material, whose second season is expected to air sometime in 2024. A commercial for the brand, which recently dug its tentacles into live entertainment, inviting Los Angeles residents to partake in “Squid Game: The Trials Experience”. And a commercial for itself, with casting for a second season already underway.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the self-serving nature of Squid Game: The Challenge, although it does bolster prior concerns surrounding the safety and fairness of the show’s first season. As contestants threaten the show’s producers with lawsuits, it is fair to consider whether or not this supposedly regulated take on Squid Game has its own version of a Front Man placing his thumb on the scales.
Of course, occasional cutaways to the show’s costumed henchmen nearly embrace this possibility. As Squid Game: The Challenge rubs our faces in its own manipulations, the result is not an antagonistic relationship between viewer and creator, but rather a no-frills acceptance of that which makes television so damn pleasurable.
But is pleasure enough? Not always, although perhaps it should be.
Politics and social justice have become increasingly worthwhile lens through which we may view our filmed entertainment, but to politicize every film or show we watch is to discount the inherent value in media consumption. Way back in Cory’s Reads #2, I wrote about the quiet rebellion one enacts each time they play a video game or watch a movie. One could certainly watch Squid Game: The Challenge and arrive at the conclusion that the show is inappropriate and unfair, but the work of watching the show and reaching that decision remains worthwhile. Nobody wants to find out their favorite reality show was a fabrication all along — and for the record, I don’t interpret that to be the case with Squid Game — but by politicizing the show’s existence, we place an unrealistic expectation of authenticity upon the show. We may wish for the show to access something real — and in its grounded portrayal of its players’ circumstances, Squid Game gets closer than most — but reality is an elusive aim for scripted and unscripted content alike.
Perhaps the only thing better than Squid Game: The Challenge to stream on Netflix this year is Todd Haynes’ May December, which toes a similar line, albeit in much more devastating terms.
As actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) works to perfectly capture and emulate the character of Gracie (Julianne Moore), she entangles herself in Gracie’s life and community more deeply than one might deem necessary. Elizabeth grows increasingly obsessed with achieving something “real”, culminating in one of the best finales to any film this year. Her off-camera and on-camera behavior become increasingly confused, and Haynes adds to the confusion by accentuating his film with a bizarrely melodramatic score. May December deals with dark and heavy subject matter, but challenges its audience to consider whether or not such material can ever be unpacked in earnest. Like Squid Game: The Challenge, Haynes’ film sensationalizes the mundane, blurring any distinctions between fact and fiction.
But do these blurred lines render Elizabeth’s obsession obsolete? Do they invalidate Squid Game’s tacit admissions of its own limitations? Or do they reinforce these stories as just that, cultural artifacts to play with and talk about before we move on to the next one?