Just producing a reality-competition show based on “Squid Game” is a pretty good way of signaling to the world that you didn’t really get “Squid Game.” Setting that aside, Netflix’s massive version of the South Korean series, dubbed “Squid Game: The Challenge,” logically morphs the concept into a super-sized “Big Brother,” mirroring the original drama’s look if not (thank goodness) its body count.
The numbers certainly paint an impressive picture, with 456 contestants vying for a record prize of $4.56 million, winner take all. If that sounds like a casting nightmare, it clearly is, and the sheer scale of the exercise suggests the program will probably need to run several years just to amortize the cost of assembling it, beginning with that creepy doll presiding over the game of “Red Light, Green Light.”
The producers try to humanize the players as best they can, sprinkling up-close-and-personal interviews throughout the festivities, in a way that creates expectations – and occasionally subverts them – about what comes next. It’s certainly an eclectic bunch, from a mother-and-son tandem to a former football player whose coalition-building tactics and swagger quickly make him a target of other participants.
Yet even with the distinctive design, down to the matching numbered sweatsuits and faceless “guards” monitoring the action, “Squid Game: The Challenge” perhaps inevitably falls back on traditional language and tropes of the reality-competition genre, a tale as old as “Survivor” and “Big Brother’s” invasion of the US almost a quarter-century ago.
Loosely translated, that means psychological gamesmanship and strategizing, tears and near-meltdowns, and plenty of brash talk about being in it to win it and not being there to make friends. Inevitably, there’s also plenty of padding, with the music working overtime to stoke the suspense.
The tension, frankly, is somewhat mitigated in the early going by the massive odds against surviving – the equivalent of the NCAA basketball tournament times seven, with the stakes slowly rising as the herd gets thinned and the chance of victory comes into sharper focus.
Netflix does break with form in one respect, spreading the 10 episodes (five were previewed) over three weeks – its own version of March Madness to kick off the holidays.
The contestants have obviously studied the series seeking clues or hints that might enhance their chances of survival. What the game can’t approximate (mercifully) is the life-or-death aspect of the experience, which the producers try to approximate – and the players oddly mime – by having people dramatically drop to the ground when they’ve been “shot” with paint pellets as a sign of their elimination.
The original 2021 dramatic series, which has the green light for a second season, derived part of its allure from its dystopian vision of how the class struggle and reality television might intersect, with the poor desperately striving and dying to the amusement of the rich.
The competition series incorporates its share of sob stories, but despite the cut-throat jockeying – and reports of some contestants requiring medical attention during filming in the UK – producers might toy with contestants for our collective amusement without tipping over into “The Hunger Games” or “The Running Man.”
Of course, if “Squid Game: The Challenge” hangs around long enough to justify the investment in those massive sets, it’s anybody’s guess where the “red light” will be, or how far players will go for that big ball of cash. For now, a little emotional turmoil and a whole lot of time-filling is, as they say, just part of playing the game.
