‘Watch through your fingers’ – Squid Game: The Challenge is the guiltiest TV pleasure of all time
There is something deeply dispiriting about watching three people gaze upwards at a giant orb containing more than $4.5m and getting excited because another few thousand bucks are being added to it. But as metaphors for modern capitalism go, this scene, early in the final episode of Squid Game: The Challenge, is wonderfully, queasily on the nose. Accumulation is an end in itself and, as has become standard practice in “last person standing” shows such as The Apprentice and films such as The Hunger Games, the winner takes all.
That was what was so striking about the drama that spawned this extraordinary challenge show. It was a devastating satire of our dog-eat-dog system, of the idea that a tiny selection of winners – just the one in Squid Game – and a multitude of losers is the natural order of things.
Squid Game: The Challenge feels like an inversion of the drama’s implied value system. The satirical beats have disappeared; the game has become the exact thing the drama railed against. As previously, the extremity is a feature, not a bug. Now, though, it is being used for our entertainment.
But, God, what entertainment. You may have watched through your fingers. You may have had concerns for the wellbeing of participants – apparently, two have explored the possibility of taking legal action against the makers. But the show’s impossibly compelling nature short-circuits even the most justifiable critiques.
In some ways, it feels like an end point. It is as if the whole history of brutal eliminative competition shows has led to this point. The dynamics of the show, the light and shade, are calibrated perfectly. It is brilliantly edited. For viewers and participants, it is one long rug-pull. Any moments of tranquillity – a picnic, a banquet in this week’s finale – segue into situations of extreme stress. The backstories of the contestants, some of which are tragic, are used unhesitatingly as dramatic fuel. This is no different from other shows, but it feels particularly stark in the context of the huge stakes here.
The banal nature of the challenges is striking, too. Without giving too much away, the final challenge trumps them all. In the drama, the fact that lives and deaths were being decided through children’s games – while, behind one-way mirrors, rich people watched and laughed – felt like a pointed comment on the arbitrariness of success and failure. It was an argument against the bogus gaslighting that is the concept of “meritocracy” in a society where wealth is allowed to flourish unchecked. Here, it sometimes feels contemptible. For now, we are the laughing spectators, but, eventually, the joke will be on us.
It is possible that, like Big Brother, the first season of Squid Game: The Challenge will prove to be the best (a second series has been commissioned). The contestants are genuinely a mixed crowd – multicultural, multinational and multigenerational, but also, essentially, curious and open-minded. There has been an exploratory element to the tasks; in season two, there will be no gangs of frat boys strategising impotently about a game of tug-of-war that will never materialise. Even the experience of living in a giant hangar with hundreds of scheming strangers in green tracksuits will seem less jarring next time around.
This season has established a lingua franca that will refine and narrow itself. But maybe, in the end, it is a simple matter of strategy – in terms of gameplay and production.
One notable feature of the final stages is that, even as the endgame has neared, there has been no suggestion among the contestants of sharing the spoils. That is central to the ethical underpinnings of Squid Game: The
Challenge. It is implausible to imagine that these conversations didn’t place; they simply haven’t been shown. This show’s currency is the pornography of jeopardy. The idea of collaboration doesn’t work with the spectacle. This might, of course, mean that the spectacle doesn’t work with our better natures. Squid Game: The Challenge has been a pleasure. But it has been a guilty one all the same.