When critics, reality-TV fans, and people even mildly aware of Squid Game learned that Netflix was planning an unscripted adaptation of the hugely popular 2021 K-drama, “seems like a bad idea!†was a fairly universal reply. Survival competition series from all countries have pushed people to their physical limits for decades — desolate locations, as in Alone and Siren, are particularly hot right now — but there was something icky about how Squid Game, a show about the dangers of greed and the evils of capitalism, was being adapted for real life. It felt like Netflix missing the point, and leaked reports from Squid Game: The Challenge’s production about grueling filming conditions seemed to support that judgment.
But then the show premiered, and as a TV experiment, it was fascinatingly edited and cleverly conceived. Did that execution excuse the premise? After its somewhat underwhelming finale and the news of a second-season renewal, Vulture critics Nicholas Quah and Roxana Hadadi got together to discuss whether it’s been worth it, and whether Squid Game can sustain itself as a reality-competition phenomenon.
Nicholas Quah: I feel exhausted, grimy, and in desperate need of a shower … and I was just sitting on the couch! Which is pretty much how I expected to feel going into the finale last night, by the way. The endgame turned out to be a fairly dull affair, but before we get to that, Roxana, I was wondering how you felt about Netflix’s decision to drop the finale episode during the prime-time slot rather than overnight as is customary. That’s new for the streamer, right? What did you think of that decision?
Roxana Hadadi: It is new, I believe, or at least I can’t remember them doing this before. And it’s a really interesting play for Netflix, which has increasingly divided up seasons of anticipated series into multiple parts to build as much tension (and gain as many new subscribers) as possible. This was a step even further in that direction, with the finale appearing alone, on its own day, and in that revered “Hey, let’s find something to watch!†hour when people are used to turning on Survivor or Top Chef. It’s very much a play to normalize Squid Game: The Challenge, which before its premiere had a ton of wary buzz — and I’m not sure the show itself, despite its fascinatingly brusque editing style, totally erased that negative anticipation. (Nearly all those competitor arcs were upsetting!) You recapped the season, Nick. What did you think going in, and did that change while you were watching?
N.Q.: Recapped and reviewed, because I’m freaky like that. I had just about the same reaction as everyone else when I first heard about the show: Ughhh. It felt strikingly cynical, taking a K-drama about the horrors of capitalism and turning it into a reality-television theme park. And to a large extent, Squid Game: The Challenge was very much that. But I’ve never been of the opinion that one should look to reality television for a purity of creative intent. At least in my case, I go into the genre looking for something compelling that’s emergent from the construction of a show. And, hey, Squid Game: The Challenge is really compelling in its design. There is that fascinatingly brusque editing style, as you elegantly put it, which feels refreshingly different, but there’s also this weird, perverse clash between the tropes of Western reality television — villain edits, “I’m not here to make friends,†etc. — and the K-drama’s grimly stark aesthetic context that produces something remarkably vivid. It tickles that part of my brain that’s drawn to an open wound. In the context of the show’s scale and spectacle, the design of the challenges and trials feels like the true star of the show more than any of the characters. But I take it that I’m in the minority, responding so positively to that. How did you feel about The Challenge?
R.H.: Well, you’ve heard my agonized complaining about this for months now. I wrote an essay about the original Squid Game’s marbles challenge and the series’ use of that episode to show how greed and self-determination often get mixed together, so yeah, I was very much in that camp of “Congratulations to Netflix for closing the ouroboros loop on how reality influences dystopian fiction, which influences reality.†But I am also an easy mark for a well-put-together episode of TV, and all my reservations aside, Squid Game: The Challenge was a compelling watch. It took certain things we’re used to in American reality TV, like the tragic backstory and the talking-head interview, and used them only sparingly. There wasn’t an overreliance on those elements to make us care about these people; on a technical level, we couldn’t care about all 456 competitors, and that is its own point, right?
I also appreciate how the adaptation changed up the challenges from the narrative series, so someone couldn’t just come in having studied the show (although, why wouldn’t you?) and expect success, nor could athletic people be the only threats. And while the social-game aspect — how certain people made alliances and tried to protect each other, while other contestants attempted to instill their own morality on the gameplay and use that an excuse for their own aggression — made me queasy, if I’m being generous, I’d say that was an element of the original series’ point.
Reality TV, whether it’s the Bravosphere of Real Housewives and Vanderpump Rules or classic competition series like The Challenge and Survivor, has long shown us how human beings can be tribal and clannish and communal and simultaneously selfish and suspicious and self-serving. All of those things are true, and my quibbles with Squid Game: The Competition doing the same thing are just because I think it was born out of a more political point. Squid Game sold itself out to the reality-TV machine, but there’s some poetic irony to that, I suppose. Putting all my college-dorm-room theorizing aside, Nick, what do you think about how the season ended, and about winner Mai? Did you peg her as a winner from the beginning?
N.Q.: I love dorm-room theorizing. That’s why I do this job! To echo one of your points, yes, absolutely, there’s a poetic irony in Squid Game selling out, though I suppose we’ll have to see how the K-drama’s second season reshapes its own legacy in that regard. And I also very much agree it’s truly annoying how Netflix is trying to have its textual cake and eat it too: “Look, people are craven! Let’s stage a fan activation!†At the same time, the reality-television manipulation of it all is so naked that I can’t help but admire it somewhat. The show makes me feel disgusting. For the most part, I think it wants me to feel disgusting. And I, a freak, nominally respect that. Reality television is often gross, no matter how it tries to dress itself up. I love it all the same.
It was structurally hard to peg Mai as a winner from the very beginning, because the show established a sense of scale that makes it impossible to do that. Indeed, the show seemed to celebrate the chaos of the crowd, and one of its preferred narrative tools was to spend time building up heroic characters, only to barely linger on them when they’re ultimately eliminated. I don’t think Mai was fully established as a character until the season’s middle third, but her winning made sense to me. As a survival-series competitor, she played a solid game: kept a low profile as needed and took ruthless shots when it mattered. The show also seemed to give her a full arc, with her being the target of the group’s wariness as we approached the endgame. Looking back, it really did feel like Mai was the recipient of the show’s version of a winner’s edit.
The last episode itself was a dud. I suspect part of this has to do with how slight the 45-minute finale-episode drop felt after an entire season of grand spectacle, but the final two challenges weren’t well designed for narrative flow. The whole rock-paper-scissors sequence ended up being too drawn out to pack much of a punch, and by the 12th key attempt or whatever, my eyes were glazing over. Not to armchair executive-produce — though, again, that’s why we have this job — but how would you have improved it, Roxana, especially now that we know we’re getting a second season of this?
R.H.: I agree about the Mai edit. Looking back now, it almost seems obvious, because we learned, compared to the other competitors, a fair amount about her life, in particular her childhood, which is usually a core component of how this genre humanizes people. Her experience as a refugee leaving Vietnam, almost getting killed by an American soldier, struggling to fit in once her family got to the U.S.; it’s crass to say “that’s all standard stuff,†but for this genre, it is! The only others we learned this much about were probably Player 182, TJ, and Player 302, LeAnn, and I actually think LeAnn and Mai would have been fascinating in a face-to-face showdown. Both women had the same kind of no-bullshit, manipulate-as-needed, compete-to-win energy; bless Phill’s heart, but I think a part of him withered against Mai in the rock-paper-scissors competition.
You mentioned in your recap that the over-and-over nature of that game sapped the finale of its internal tension. It made me wish the final hurdle had been something that was purely chance based, like the three buttons of the penultimate challenge. That inability to game the system would have felt more in line with what I thought Squid Game was about — the arbitrariness of success — and it would have been more interesting to watch, instead of seeing another pair of outstretched hands making rock, paper, and scissor symbols and another chunky metal key thrown slow-motion into the sand.
Looking ahead to season two, I do wonder: How do they keep this going? So much of the appeal of The Challenge was tied to Squid Game itself, and to the eccentricity and singularity of the games in that show that were re-created for this show. We saw how psyched contestants were by the giant doll of Red Light, Green Light, and of the elaborate production of the glass bridge. For the most part, I liked the new games like Battleship and how they tried to equalize the playing field by being so unexpected. But I’m curious if a second season maintains the original Squid Game challenges (which means that future competitors have a further leg up, because they can study the original series and this season to prepare), which is kind of the appeal of this show in the first place, or if they go totally off the wall and make all-new games that will be completely unfamiliar to the contestants. I think the latter would be more interesting to watch, but then, would it be Squid Game? Is there a world in which The Challenge should have been only a one-season show? What do you think, Nick?
N.Q.: A world in which something like Squid Game: The Challenge would be a glorious one-season spectacle is a world of capitalist restraint, which means a world that couldn’t possibly generate the original Squid Game in the first place. Given the reality show’s success, this was inevitable. Will future seasons be effective? My first instinct is to doubt it. So much of what made The Challenge work, for me at least, is its oddness, its novelty, the sheer bizarro nature of it even existing. (Which, relatedly, is a big part of why I bounced off anything past the first season of The Circle.) There is also the natural reality-television progression where competitors of subsequent seasons come in fully educated in the systems of the show, which creates a kind of internal culture that pushes any franchise closer to professional-wrestling territory. In theory, the show could counteract this by dramatically changing the nature not just of the challenges but of the game entirely, so as to keep future generations of players perpetually on their toes. But then we would return to the essential question you raise: Would it be Squid Game?
Then again — dorm-room theorizing mode, reactivated — what is Squid Game in a world where the damn thing is now a reality-competition show? The next phase of that question, most probably, lies on the shoulders of Hwang Dong-hyuk, and however the second season of his K-drama ends up shaping the answer. Boy, it can’t come soon enough.