Hug It Out With ‘Squid Game’

In one of the strangest TV developments of this year, or any year, the British-produced ‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ takes the architecture of the Korean drama ‘Squid Game‘ and strips it of all its satire, tension, and horror, replacing it with a hot load of saccharine nonsense. The Squid Game reality show is still watchable, in the sense that any reality show involving characters being “eliminated” en route to a prize is watchable. It has impeccable set design and decent cliffhangers. You cannot fault the formula, and you keep watching, because you want to see who wins. But like with most reality TV, it’s also contextless sludge.

In the original ‘Squid Game’, a motley group of characters, almost all Korean, compete in a brutal series of blood sports for the amusement of rich assholes wearing Eyes Wide Shut-style masks, with a vast fortune awaiting the traumatized winner. They do so in a hidden location, because the Squid Game is incredibly illegal. ‘The Challenge,’ on the other hand, takes place in a TV studio in England. They have meticulously recreated the sets of the original Squid Game, which is cool, and the Squid Game attendants have the same costumes, also cool. It looks like Squid Game, it feels like Squid Game, but it is not.

No rich guys watch on closed-circuit while playing pervy grab-ass with the help. We are the audience, which would be a creepy Black Mirror-style twist, except the reality show has no such sense of irony. Instead, you get an international version of Big Brother, except set in a sort of stylized prison camp where an international cast of characters play the equivalent of Tic-Tac-Toe for money. Unlike in Squid Game, there’s no undercover cop trying to expose the wrongdoings. What would they get if they pulled back the curtains? People daubing makeup on the contestants, preparing them for their supplemental interviews.

‘The Challenge’ is watchable for a few reasons. It has an international cast of aspirants, some of whom appear to be moonlighting TikTok influencers but others who seem to be normal people with actual jobs. The global reach is kind of interesting insofar as you can see how the reality-show mindset has spread, a worldwide language of getting rich and famous via a form of concentrated on-camera suffering. Some of the characters the show highlights are very appealing, though don’t attach yourself. One moment someone will deliver an emotional plea about needing the money to pay for their daughter’s brain surgery or something, and the next moment they will hurtle through the floor to their “death.”

And that’s the main difference between ‘The Challenge’ and the original show. In ‘Squid Game’, when people died, they actually became corpses that the sadistic game operators needed to dispose of and cover up. The Challenge fits players with ink packets under their shirts, which explode when they’re “eliminated.” Players then need to fall to the ground and play dead, though some of them, particularly early on, do so with an “oh well” smirk and a shoulder shrug, knowing full well they’ll be sleeping in their own bed that night instead of scrapping for tins of food with a bunch of disingenuous assholes in a fake dormitory.

But the show can’t even really commit to the death meme. Particularly in the second half, it “eliminates” a lot of its players through acts of random chance, or Survivor-style voting off the island, leading to a lot of bitchy gossip about “who I can trust” and who is a “snake in the grass.”  ‘Squid Game’ locked players in a literal struggle to the death. In this version, they hug and cry and declare “I love you” constantly, like they’re in a lunatic motivational cult.

Much like with the first season of Survivor, the suckers who manage to hang around until the end are of the mistaken impression that this is a team game that you should play with integrity. They want to leave the winning of a $4.6 million prize, by far the largest in TV history, up to random chance. And, to some extent, that’s how Squid Game structures itself. But the only contestants with an actual shot at winning are the ones who truly understand the meta-game and turn it to their advantage. In the end, the person who ends up taking the money is definitely the best player.

But the poor sap who won in the fictional Squid Game had to climb over a pile of corpses. As we see in the final scenes of ‘The Challenge,’ our favorite contestants who didn’t win are still living nice bourgeois lives, kissing their children good morning, walking to work on a sunny day, and engaging in a friendly game of Ping-Pong with their families. One of them is now quite rich, but the rest are still basically happy, got to be on TV, and made “friends for life” with whom they got to share a sobbing, hugging moment while wearing a green jumpsuit. Which was not the point of the original Squid Game at all.