Squid Game: The Challenge

It would have been nice to see more Korean players, and the drama’s sense of capitalist satire is muted here, but after banging through eight of the episodes, I have to declare myself hooked. Move over The Traitors, there’s some wild new gameshow crack in town.

Squid Game: The Challenge is fully aware it’s a hokey reality show capitalizing on pre-existing content, and it doesn’t try to be anything more than that. Somehow, it still manages to employ new twists that match up to Squid Game’s intrigue.

Cast members are the inarguable highlight of “The Challenge.” On the one hand, the show is distinguished by its scale. .... As the show continues beyond its initial flex and can concentrate on a rapidly shrinking number of stars, “The Challenge” comes alive on a much more intimate scale.

I had my doubts to begin with, but Squid Game: The Challenge not only lives up to the original show, but with the new twists, challenges, and the real-life prize fund at stake, it's even more intense than the hit show.

Not only does Squid Game: The Challenge qualify as damn good reality television, it even serves as an unexpectedly effective adaptation of the original K-drama. The game show uses the language of modern reality television to realize, in its own strange way, the themes in Dong-hyuk’s parable of capitalism grinding human beings into dust.

With money at stake, rather than life itself, some of the cooped-up politicking in the middle episodes smacks wearily of Big Brother. Other passages of play lean too heavily on popularity contests. But by the final few episodes the tension, intrigue and antagonism are bubbling to the boil. I’ve seen eight of the ten episodes and am agog to discover how ruthless the last dollar-driven survivors can be.

It was reasonable to assume that Squid Game: The Challenge would be a cash-in, a cynical by-product of the original’s success that would miss the point entirely, and perhaps it does. But as a gameshow, as the spectacle it sets out to be, it is very hard to look away.

Along with the usual tension of the ticking clock, the tough task, the difficult decision — all very effective — participants are made uncomfortable on a moral level; one might be called upon to choose between acting nobly and metaphorically assassinating a competitor, in front of the crowd. They may be forced to face themselves. It’s clever that way. .... But in “Squid Game: The Challenge,” the only audience is, you know, the audience, make of us what you will.

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.

Its marriage of unscripted programming and the bespoke imagery of Squid Game borders on bad taste; it feels particularly gross whenever it mimics the violence found in the hit Korean drama. That said, it still manages to be entertaining.

It’s overlong, overblown, and thinks it’s much smarter than it really is. But as a showcase for human desperation, and an illustration of the random brutality of chance, it just about sticks the landing.

Like most competition programs, it’s highly bingeable, even addictive. Yet it’s too obviously packaged, its games carelessly designed.

The challenges are padded out with interviews, reaction shots, and dramatic pauses that go on long after all the tension has been released. Ultimately, these are squib games that provide enough noise and motion for a passable simulacrum of the original show’s devastating drama.

All reality television is morally questionable to some degree because the audience is getting entertainment from the struggles and often the suffering of real people, but there's something about "Squid Game: The Challenge" that feels especially insidious. .... It's fairly well-made reality television, but at what cost?

The feuds and alliances will likely heat up as the competition gets tighter, and the possibility of other new challenges adds some intrigue. But that first batch of five episodes is kind of a snooze. Squid Game: The Challenge is no match for Squid Game itself — and in the annals of reality contest shows, it's no great shakes either.

You’re better off watching Squid Game again than watching the cynical, depressing mess that is Squid Game: The Challenge.

It gets rid of the messy murder business — sort of — along with most of the uncomfortable ideas. What’s left is a beautifully designed but empty game box, a creepy dystopia cosplay, an answer to the question of what happens when you take a darkly pointed TV satire and remove its brains.

The Challenge builds on the most superficial aspects of Squid Game while ditching — or, really, undermining — the most profound.

In pretending that the stakes are much higher than they actually are, the entire enterprise feels trivialized.

The betrayals the game forces them to enact, and the elimination of players with fake black blood and playacting death, leads to severe, sometimes unhinged outbursts that are icky and intrusive to witness. These people are hurting in the artificial environment, and I can’t even remember their names, just the numbers emblazoned on their chests.

The central themes of Squid Game – the futility of social mobility, how we assess life in terms of monetary value – are completely lost among the bitching, backstabbing and gameplans. Perhaps I’m being a miser, maybe I should just give in to the fun of it all. But Squid Game: The Challenge left me feeling empty and grubby.