Anyone who enjoyed watching Squid Game will likely devour Netflix's reality spin-off Squid Game: The Challenge. The reality series, which made its debut on the streamer on November 22 with the first of three weekly drops, is a Big Brother-style social competition that precisely recreates the premise from the hit K-drama, recreating the original's unsettling candy-colored sets, children's game-inspired challenges, and brutal (though in this case nonfatal) eliminations. As several reviews have pointed out (and as social media users clocked months ago upon seeing the show's trailer), Netflix's attempt to turn its most-watched show ever into an IP franchise strips away its central message as a horrifying fable on desperation under capitalism. Instead, Squid Game: The Challenge is the pure neutral evil of reality television: easy to binge, but soulless and devoid of any purpose or meaning.
Watching this reality show is a bleak experience, filled with the cognitive dissonance of seeing a hollow recreation of the drama created by people who didn't take its themes to heart. It's obvious from the first moments of the series that there were certain beats the reality show made to channel the original. The first "processing room" testimonial introduces a woman admitting that she's taking unpaid leave from work to be on the show, that she dreams of knowing what it's like to pay off her house. Minutes later, she's the first player out during Red Light, Green Light, followed by several others who fake draamatic "deaths" after an exploding ink pack signifies their elimination (instead of the original's bullets and blood). This short sequence is enough to demonstrate the most superficial interpretation of Squid Game's themes, and you can imagine some hypothetical producer in a control booth checking off a list. (In related news, an executive producer for the reality show told TV Guide that he believes "the anti-capitalist allegory is only one very small part of Squid Game.")
