In Squid Game, Netflix’s wildly successful Korean drama about a dystopian gameshow, the stakes are life or death. Contestants are prepared to risk it all for a shot at the 45 billion won prize pot – and might pay for one wrong move with their life. It’s disturbing stuff. But if you watched it and thought, “Hey, how hard can it actually be to beat that giant doll at Grandmother’s Footsteps?”, then the streamer has launched the spin-off just for you. Squid Game: The Challenge sees 456 ordinary people take on the childhood games familiar from the original drama, while living in an uncanny recreation of the show’s set, complete with Escher-like stairs and institutional bunk beds stacked five storeys high. Each of the green tracksuited players hopes to walk away with the highest jackpot ever seen in the history of reality TV: $4.56m (£3.6m).
It’s a pretty audacious concept: to take the drama’s searing critique of capitalism, and turn it into a cash grab. But the hit-and-miss history of reality TV is littered with big, bizarre ideas. There are glittering success stories and failures that land with a thud: for every Strictly Come Dancing, there’s a Splash! There are concepts that take a little while to warm up, but have you hooked by the end of episode one (like last year’s word-of-mouth hit The Traitors, or the weird but somehow wonderful Masked Singer). And there are shows that leave you wondering, “How on earth did they come up with this?” The ones you think you might have hallucinated, until you go down an internet black hole and confirm that yes, in 2005, the Channel 4 show Space Cadets really did convince a dozen Brits that they were undergoing cosmonaut training at a Russian military base, before blasting off into space (they were, in fact, in an old RAF base in Suffolk the whole time).
