Beast Games, Amazon Prime Video’s reality competition series hosted by the YouTuber known as MrBeast, is not a well-made show. It is certainly an expensive show, something Mr Beast, the alter ego for 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson of Greenville, North Carolina, likes to frequently remind viewers. The series is a feat of scale shocking to audiences outside the realm of YouTube, and especially Donaldson’s fiefdom: 1,000 contestants, filmed by a system of 1,107 cameras, battling each other for a $5m cash prize – the largest in entertainment history, according to Donaldson. For the competition, Donaldson and his posse designed a warehouse war zone modeled on the Netflix dystopian series Squid Game, constructed a bespoke city and purchased a private island (also to be given away, along with a Lamborghini and other lavish prizes). Contestants eliminated in the first episode are dropped through trap doors to unseen depths; there is a pirate ship with cannons.
Yet for all the ostentatious displays of wealth, the show still looks terrible – garishly lit, frenetically edited, poorly structured, annoyingly loud and tackily designed. Many have pointed out that the show’s central conceit – broke Americans duking it out and playing psychological warfare for luxury prizes, many in the name of paying their bills – is as dystopian as the Netflix series it’s based on, a depressing spectacle of aggro-capitalism for our neo-Gilded Age times, with Donaldson as a self-styled Willy Wonka figure.
